Optimal MembraneProcess Design (OMPD): A Software Product for Optimal Design of Membrane Gas Separation Processes Abstract   The optimal design of a membrane gas separation process requires minimizing several objective functions subject to nonlinear relationships among the optimizing variables. This article describes a novel software product, named Optimal MembraneProcess Design (OMPD), for the optimal design of membrane gas separation processes. The product generates several potential process design configurations and then searches the process design parameters and operating conditions spaces to arrive at optimal design specifications and operating conditions. It is able to consider every type and any number of operational, compositional, and economical objective functions in a computationally costeffective manner. It calculates all Pareto optimal solutions in a single trial. It can optimize any number of membrane units arranged in multistep andor multistage configurations. It optimally places pairs of adjacent membrane units, either twostep or twostage, while simultaneously considering several membrane types.

An Advanced Membrane Evolutionary Algorithm for Constrained Engineering Design Problems. The main goal of this paper is to propose an advanced dynamic membrane algorithm (ADMAPSOGA) based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the constrained problems in engineering design. The proposed algorithm combines membrane computing with the particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm. In the PSO phase, the worst solutions are enhanced by the globallocal best inertia weight and acceleration coefficients. In the second phase, crossover and mutation operators have been used to further improve the balance between the exploration and exploitation ability in PSO. The constraints are handled using a parameterfree penalty function. Several wellknown engineering design problems have been used to measure the performance of the proposed algorithm in this paper. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the stateoftheart algorithms.