Tool for decision-making support in biorefineries development

Abstract

Industries integration is a promising source of sustainability. Sugar cane industry must redesign the production processes, including new emerging technologies, in order to retain the status of competitive industry. The integration is a complex process accomplish by engineers where de main problems are alternative generation and alternative comparing. Engineers must execute several subtasks like: factory retrofit, macro-localization, dynamic indicators computing and so on. Processes engineer is complex, so, a good computation support is needed. In this work we state that existent tools are not enough to accomplish this supporting. In this paper we analyze industrial integration like a process, composite by several decisions, executed by engineers. Useful computational technologies and methods are presented. These methods are our bricks for a tool supporting every single process engineer task. Some of the presented methods had been used previously but need to be adapted to this industry. Our approach is not only to integrate existent tools o creating new tools but automating most decision making. Finally, we show a typical case of sugar cane industry integration. In this case several modifications are needed in order to be competitive; engineers must select raw materials and technologies to use in the production of furfural, ethanol and citric acid. The technologies involved in this case can use sugar molasses, bagasse and sugar cane straw as raw material. The optimization results for this problem show the advantages of integrating several raw materials sources.