Parallel processing strategies for chemical process flowsheeting
James A. Vegeais, Mark A. Stadtherr · AIChE Journal · 1992
Abstract The potential for using the sequential‐modular, simultaneous‐modular, and equation‐based approaches to process flowsheeting on multiprocessing (parallel processing) computer architectures is assessed. The simultaneous‐modular and equation‐based problem formulations appear to be the most promising, but the sparse matrix techniques currently used, especially for the latter, do not perform well on parallel machines. We consider two different decomposition schemes for parallelizing the sparse matrix problems that must be solved. These are the bordered‐diagonal form and the bordered‐block‐diagonal form. The latter takes advantage of the inherent block structure of the flowsheeting matrix and represents a promising strategy for solving flowsheeting problems on parallel machines, especially for large problems.