(174d) Development of Web-Based on-Line Optimization System

Recently, the chemical industry has been challenged to cope with frequent changes in market demand. In the early days, chemical companies chiefly produced commodity chemicals. Nowadays, their focus has moved to higher value-added chemical engineering product. This trend brings the chemical product design into the spotlight of chemical engineering. Chemical product design was applied to develop the chemical engineering product such as hand lotion, cosmetics, vitamin C tablets, and drugs.

Most of the studies on chemical product design have limited themselves to material product especially chemicals, formulated product and structured product. However, there are other kinds of product in the chemical industry. Chemical engineering product includes non-material product as well as material product. The non-material product, which consists of software and service, has been paid little attention by chemical product design. However, the non-material product has been regarded as important components of product design in other fields of engineering. Therefore it is reasonable to infer that the chemical product design have higher potential for extension to the development of non-material product.

This paper aims to introduce case studies for design of the non-material product. Development of web-based on-line optimization system is presented as a case study for the non-material product of chemical engineering product. Process optimization at a chemical plant is very helpful for saving costs. However, the process optimization requires too much time and cost because of the geographical distance between the chemical plants and the group of experts. Thus a management system for an optimization project can be presented as a clue .The design procedure for the web-based on-line optimization system consists of three steps - definition of main function, decomposition of the main function into sub-functions and implementation. In the first step, definition of main function, identification of optimization process and search for causes of time and cost consumption from optimization experts are performed. Evaluation for root causes and translation of root causes to modules are needed in the latter half of this step. The second step, decomposition of the main function into sub-functions includes search for candidates of composition function, combination & improvement of candidates and selection of composition functions to each module. The last step is implementation of selected modules. At first, prototype is manufactured. By this prototype, modules are assessed and refined. After assessment, detailed design of product is created. Finally, target product is manufactured. A plant-wide compressor network system optimization was selected as a case for application of the web-based on-line optimization system. As a result, the cost and the time of the optimization project were reduced by 43.5% and 43.3% by final product.