Automated Synthesis of Steady-State Continuous Processes using Reinforcement Learning
Automated flowsheet synthesis is an important field in computer-aided process engineering. The present work demonstrates how reinforcement learning can be used for automated flowsheet synthesis without any heuristics of prior knowledge of conceptual design. The environment consists of a steady-state flowsheet simulator that contains all physical knowledge. An agent is trained to take discrete actions and sequentially built up flowsheets that solve a given process problem. A novel method named SynGameZero is developed to ensure good exploration schemes in the complex problem. Therein, flowsheet synthesis is modelled as a game of two competing players. The agent plays this game against itself during training and consists of an artificial neural network and a tree search for forward planning. The method is applied successfully to a reaction-distillation process in a quaternary system.
- Publikationsart
- Sonstige Veröffentlichungen
- Titel
- Automated Synthesis of Steady-State Continuous Processes using Reinforcement Learning
- Medien
- arXiv:2101.04422
- Autoren
- Quirin Göttl, Prof. Dr. Dominik Grimm , Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jakob Burger
- Veröffentlichungsdatum
- 12.01.2021
- Zitation
- Göttl, Quirin; Grimm, Dominik; Burger, Jakob (2021): Automated Synthesis of Steady-State Continuous Processes using Reinforcement Learning. arXiv:2101.04422.