(75f) Keynote Talk - Decision Making in Digitalized Value Chain Optimization

With digitalization being such a hot topic in control and real-time optimization, this talk focuses more narrowly on tactical and strategic decision making which typically has more humans in the loop. After briefly introducing ExxonMobil’s Downstream value chain, I will highlight two broad themes: Modeling competition between players and tractable optimization under uncertainty. In the first theme, I will introduce problems in which multiple players vie with one another to maximize individual profit in a non-cooperative competitive market. This competitive setting is interesting and worthy of study because the majority of prevailing process systems engineering models largely overlook non-cooperative strategies that exist in real-world markets. In the second theme, I will discuss the decision rule approach to optimization under uncertainty and how we have applied it to several PSE problems. I will conclude with some future research topics that I hope are of interest to the broad community.