Targeted incremental debottlenecking of batch process plants

This paper provides analysis and debottlenecking strategies for batch process plants. Operational characteristics like shared resources, multiple products and product lines, and process step variability can make debottlenecking choices complex. A disciplined methodology for debottlenecking helps an improvement team to sift through options efficiently to find cost-effective recommendations that meet the desired improvement goals but avoid wasteful or excessive investment. We take into consideration these challenges and provide a practical methodology for the systematic debottlenecking of batch processes through the use of statistical, discrete-event simulation, and optimization tools. The analysis and methodology we propose is applicable quite generally to parallel, sequential, as well as sequential-parallel multi-product batch plant configurations.