(479h) Simultaneous Optimization of the Design of the Product, Process Andsupply Chain for Formulated Products

The market for consumer products is more competitive than ever as a result of globalization. Therefore, the product not only has to satisfy the specific needs and likes of the consumer, but also has to be sustainable and keep production and distribution costs to a minimum. Therefore, the first stage to design any consumer product consists of identifying those needs and wishes and convert them into physico-chemical properties of the product (Bagajewicz et al., 2011). Subsequently, a process is to be put together that is capable of producing the expected product or a family of products. Finally, it will be necessary to design a supply chain that allows not only to supply the production process, but also to distribute the final product in an efficient way. To achieve the best economic and environmental performance, it is necessary to carry out these three stages simultaneously (Taifouris et al., 2020). This is especially important in the case of formulated products (Martín and Martínez, 2013) .This type of product consists of the mixture of ingredients that are capable of providing the characteristics that the consumer expects (Ng and Gani, 2018).Its design can be easily changed through modifications in the production process and in the ingredients used, resulting in a feasible set of products that is too large. The integrated design of the process, product and supply chain allows a global analysis of what would be the best formulation of a product, the optimal operating conditions, the best suppliers, locations to build the factories as well as the potential customers, not only from the economic point of view if not also environmental. This makes it possible to design completely sustainable processes (Taifouris et al., 2020), reducing the feasible set of products and facilitating experimentation.

In this work, an integrated framework and solution procedure are developed. The formulation considers the design of processes, products and supply chains simultaneously for formulated consumer products, in particular the case of powder detergent design. The production process can be considered as an extended pooling problem with restrictions that mainly affect the particle size or cake strength and that are related to the composition of the final product. Furthermore, the quality of the product is quantified with the cleaning performance and is introduced in the model as a further restriction. Three detergents are produced with different performance and prices.17 different ingredients classified into 7 groups are considered depending on the type of ingredients (surfactant, filler, enzymes, etc.). In addition, it is considered that the price of some of these ingredients can be set by multi-period contracts, with 4 different price policies depending on the amount used (linear, logarithm, constant elasticity and fixed) and others have an associated uncertainty. The design problem is multi-objective, seeking the balance between the economic benefit and the environmental impact of the whole process.It will be multi-period, considering 3 years of production. The size of the supply chain will be continental, resulting in a large MINLP problem that must be solved to global optimality.

A solution procedure inspired on Outer Approximation is developed to address the case study that considered the entire Europe with up to 29 actual suppliers corresponding to major chemical producers, major retailers across the continent and 68 feasible locations for the production facilities. Because of confidentiality issues, no real demand, raw material or product prices are used. The model solves the need to install three facilities. Only one of the three produces the three detergents, Czech Republic. Another one, in Barcelona, produces the second and third class detergents while the last one, Amiens, only produces the cheapest one to match the demand. Together with the allocation of the facilities, product composition and the suppliers of each one of the ingredients are selected for sustainable product design

References

Bagajewicz, M., Hill, S., Robben, A., Lopez, H., Sanders, M., Sposato, E., Baade, C., Manora, S., Hey Coradin, J., 2011. Product design in price-competitive markets: a case study of a skin moisturizing lotion. AIChE J. 57 (1), 160–177.

Martín, M., Martínez, A., 2013. Methodology for simultaneous process and product design in the consumer products industry: The case study of the laundry business. Chem. Eng. Res. Des. 91 .795-809.

Ng, Ka M., Gani, R., 2018. Chemical Product Design: Advances in Research and Teaching. Comput. Aided Chem. Eng.44, 21-32.

Taifouris, M., Martín, M., Martínez, A., Esquejo, N., 2020. Challenges in the design of formulated products: multiscale process and product design.Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering. 27 1-9.