Contribution of the Author to the Publications

Structural and societal changes in process industry have lead to new requirements in process development, design and project management. The growing importance of health, safety and environmental aspects has increased the number of criteria considered in design. The decisions have to be made in a multicriteria environment considering uncertainty and the life-cycle point of view. Process industry has also changed toward more specialized products. The advanced design methodologies such as clean technology and inherently safer design are emphasizing early conceptual decisions for process efficiency. The traditional methods of design, research and development projects are therefore always not adequate. The thesis presents new methods and approaches to respond to the new challenges in process development and design, which attempt to amalgamate process design with design process management and the important extension of process integration towards the consideration of process sustainability; extending the horizon to process life-cycle and offering a systematic aid to decision making at the conceptual design stage aiming at multicriteria optimality. The methods presented include: 1) Extended problem solving based method for process design, 2) analytic hierarchy process based multicriteria decision making approach for process concept evaluations, 3) genetic algorithm based process synthesis method using multicriteria approach under uncertainty, 4) evaluative approach to process development, 5) enhanced modeling approach for different life-cycle phases and model library, 6) approach for multicriteria based assessment with life-cycle perspective and 7) decision based project management tool for product and process development projects. The combined approach presented includes these methods together with scope of evaluation definition, life-cycle indicators and a tool pack of general methods.