Enterprise Decision-making Framework for Chemical Product Design in Integrated Biorefineries

Biomass utilisation is identified as a promising solution to minimise society’s dependency on fossil fuels for energy generation. By employing the concept of integrated biorefinery, biomass can be converted into power, heat and value-added products in a sustainable and efficient way. To date, biomass can be converted into a spectrum of products with the availability of various biomass conversion pathways. Due to the substantial amount of potential products and conversion technologies, design of chemical products and processing routes in integrated biorefinery has become more challenging. Furthermore, consumer-driven chemical product design has gained magnificent attention in chemical industry, owing to the shifting of market from commodity products to high-value-added products. As a result, the task of chemical product design that is traditionally dedicated to chemists has nowadays become a multifaceted process that requires collective efforts from various fields. In this work, a framework is proposed to facilitate the decision-making involved in the overall chemical product design and production process by integrating four major organisational units of an enterprise: corporate unit, business unit, research and development (R&D) unit and production unit. The corporate unit is responsible for the enterprise goal line setting for the entire chemical product design and production process, the business unit performs detailed analysis on the existing market, the R&D unit is in charge of the design of chemical product that fulfils the customers’ needs while the production unit produces the chemical product. As a whole, the cooperation between these major organisational units of an enterprise design product that fulfils product needs, determines conversion pathways to produce the product from biomass and identifies product demand and price while fulfilling the enterprise goals. To illustrate the proposed methodology, a case study on the design of dry-cleaning solvent from palm-based biomass is presented.