Distributed decision making for intensified process systems

Process intensification can afford considerable benefits with respect to economics, sustainability and/or safety but also presents increased decision making challenges with respect to computational efficiency and flexibility across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Distributed decision making, that is, localized yet coordinated decision making among constituent subsystems, is a promising approach to alleviating these challenges. Determination of these subsystems is at the heart of the distributed paradigm. This paper gives a summary of recent developments and future directions in distributed decision making for intensified systems, specifically with respect to optimization, control and monitoring, with emphasis on methods for obtaining high quality decompositions for such problems based on network theory. It also discusses integrated renewable energy and chemical production, a new and promising domain of large-scale process intensification, in the context of systems engineering challenges and opportunities.