− In the fields of researches associated with plant layout optimization, the main goal is to minimize the costs of pipelines for connecting equipment. However, what is the lacking of considerations in previous researches is to handle the multi floor processes considering the safety distances for domino impacts on a complex plant. The mathematical programming formulation can be transformed into MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) problems as considering safety distances, maintenance spaces, and economic benefits for solving the multi-floor plant layout problem. The objective function of this problem is to minimize piping costs connecting facilities in the process. However, it is really hard to solve this problem due to complex unequality or equality constraints such as sufficient spaces for the maintenance and passages, meaning that there are many conditional statements in the objective function. Thus, it is impossible to solve this problem with conventional optimization solvers using the derivatives of objective function. In this study, the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) technique, which is one of the representative sampling approaches, is employed to find the optimal solution considering various constraints. The EO (Ethylene Oxide) plant is illustrated to verify the efficacy of the proposed method.Key words: Plant Layout Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization, MILP, Ethylene Oxide Plant † To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: changjunlee@pknu.ac.kr ‡ 이 논문은 서울대학교 윤인섭 교수님의 정년을 기념하여 투고되었습니다. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
