(312d) Traversing from Trees to the Woods: Role of Graph Theory in Understanding and Controlling Networks in Chemical Engineering

Networks are common in natural and engineered systems. They are also ubiquitous in chemical engineering, emerging in biological systems and thermochemical reactions, materials, and chemical processes, where hundreds to thousands of nodes are interconnected in a complex web of interactions (reaction/material/energy/data flow). To understand node and edge-level properties and their implications at the network level requires sophisticated algorithms, including graph theory and mathematical programming. To this end, Prof. Daoutidis has made many seminal contributions two rich classes of networks, viz., reaction and process networks.

In this talk, I will specifically discuss the role of graph theory in reaction network generation and analysis and control of process networks, wherein I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Daoutidis and colleagues on algorithm development and consequent applications. In the first part, I will discuss Rule Input Network Generator, a computational tool for network generation and analysis that was developed to understand reaction networks, initially in biomass conversion, but later applied in a variety of other topics. In the second part, I will discuss how graph traversal algorithms provide an analogous approach to singular perturbation analysis to decompose energy and mass integrated networks that exhibit multiple timescales.