Synthesis and Dispatching of Production Schemes for Chemical Batch Plants

We propose a computer-aided methodology to automatically generate production schemes for chemical batch plants operating in multi-batch mode. Our approach is based on the following principles: (1) the plant is modeled at the level of process operations whose behavior is specified by timed automata, (2) the production schemes are generated using algorithms for reachability analysis of timed automata implemented in OpenKronos [3], (3) the output of the verification tool is post-processed to derive a dispatcher. Our method works for non-cyclic and cyclic production. We apply our methodology to the batch plant at the University of Dortmund. The automatically computed operation schemes turn out to be more efficient than the previously used handwritten ones.