ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some developments in process synthesis and design and investigates their potential application in present and future biotechnology process design. It includes an evaluation of rigorous computer methods in chemical engineering, recent developments in artificial intelligence, particularly the field of expert systems, and the potential of using a combination of such techniques for biotechnology process synthesis. The chapter outlines with an attempt to extract the relevant information to construct a framework for downstream process synthesis. Evolutionary methods have been developed in chemical process engineering to overcome some of the uncertainty of heuristic methods and to use, whenever available, simulation tools to improve the design. The basic idea of this approach is to modify substructures of an existing design to improve the objective function. The generation of the initial structure is crucial to the success of the evolutionary method.
