New frontiers, challenges, and opportunities in integration of design and control for enterprise-wide sustainability

Enterprise-wide sustainability involves aspects from molecular-scale design to macroscale facilities. Typically, these aspects are treated as independent sub-problems. Maintaining consistent information flow among the sub-problems in an integrated fashion provides additional opportunities in pursuing the ultimate goals of sustainable environmentally-friendly processes. Integration of design and control represents the core and foremost component of such an integrated approach. In this study, the major challenges of the core problem are classified. Perspectives on the advances, new frontiers, and emerging areas in this field are also addressed. Emerging trends such as advanced techniques to connect the sub-problems in the chemical supply chain, incorporation of expert decisions and sophisticated modeling techniques will be discussed. Much more work is still needed to determine a comprehensive vision of the integrated problem. Such achievement requires efficient programming techniques, mature data analysis procedures, and high-performance computing environments. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.