A MOO approach towards sustainable process design: integrating the three pillars of sustainability

Sustainability is a primary issue in the design of “smart” chemical processes. The concept of sustainability covers three different aspects: economic, environmental, and social. These aspects represent the so-called “three pillars of sustainability”. In the last few decades, a considerable effort has been spent to provide a quantitative analysis of each of these dimensions and a large number of metrics and indicators have been proposed. As far as the chemical industry is concerned, the traditional approach mainly focuses on the economic assessment, according to the Conceptual Design methodology (Douglas, 1988). Aim of this paper is to carry out a multi-objective optimization (MOO) of a chemical process based on some quantitative analysis of each of the three pillars of sustainability. A specific methodology is adopted to define three different metrics, which represent the sustainability objective functions.