Perspectives for process systems engineering - Personal views from academia and industry

Process systems engineering (PSE) has been an active research field for almost 50 years. Its major achievements includemethodologies and tools to support processmodeling, simulation and optimization (MSO). Mature, commercially available technologies have been penetrating all fields of chemical engineering in academia as well as in industrial practice. MSO technologies have become a commodity, they are not a distinguishing feature of the PSE field any more. Consequently, PSE has to reassess and to reposition its future research agenda. Emphasis should be put onmodel-based applications in all PSE domains including product and process design, control and operations. Furthermore, systems thinking and systems problem solving have to be prioritized rather than the mere application of computational problem solving meth-