화학공학소재연구정보센터
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.58, No.28, 12712-12722, 2019
Robust Optimization for the Pooling Problem
The pooling problem has applications, for example, in petrochemical refining, water networks, and supply chains and is widely studied in global optimization. To date, it has largely been treated deterministically, neglecting the influence of parametric uncertainty. This paper applies two robust optimization approaches, reformulation and cutting planes, to the nonlinear, nonconvex pooling problem. Most applications of robust optimization have been either convex or mixed-integer linear problems. We explore the suitability of robust optimization in the context of global optimization problems which are concave in the uncertain parameters by considering the pooling problem with uncertain inlet concentrations. We compare the computational efficiency of reformulation and cutting plane approaches for three commonly used uncertainty set geometries on 14 pooling problem instances and demonstrate how accounting for uncertainty changes the optimal solution.