Surrogate Assisted Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimisation applied to a Pressure Swing Adsorption system

Abstract: Chemical plant design and optimisation have proven challenging due to the complexity of these real-world systems. The resulting complexity translates into high computational costs for these systems' mathematical formulations and simulation models. Research has illustrated the benefits of using machine learning surrogate models as substitutes for computationally expensive models during optimisation. This paper extends recent research into optimising chemical plant design and operation. The study further explores Surrogate Assisted Genetic Algorithms (SA-GA) in more complex variants of the original plant design and optimisation problems, such as the inclusion of parallel and feedback components. The novel extension to the original algorithm proposed in this study, Surrogate Assisted NSGA-\Romannum{2} (SA-NSGA), was tested on a popular literature case, the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) system. We further provide extensive experimentation, comparing various meta-heuristic optimisation techniques and numerous machine learning models as surrogates. The results for both sets of systems illustrate the benefits of using Genetic Algorithms as an optimisation framework for complex chemical plant system design and optimisation for both single and multi-objective scenarios. We confirm that Random Forest surrogate assisted Evolutionary Algorithms can be scaled to increasingly complex chemical systems with parallel and feedback components. We further find that combining a Genetic Algorithm framework with Machine Learning Surrogate models as a substitute for long-running simulation models yields significant computational efficiency improvements, 1.7 - 1.84 times speedup for the increased complexity examples and a 2.7 times speedup for the Pressure Swing Adsorption system.