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Deep Reinforcement Learning for Process Synthesis

Machine Learning 2020-09-29 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to process synthesis by presenting Distillation Gym, a set of RL environments in which an RL agent is tasked with designing a distillation train, given a user defined multi-component feed stream. Distillation Gym interfaces with a process simulator (COCO and ChemSep) to simulate the environment. A demonstration of two distillation problem examples are discussed in this paper (a Benzene, Toluene, P-xylene separation problem and a hydrocarbon separation problem), in which a deep RL agent is successfully able to learn within Distillation Gym to produce reasonable designs. Finally, this paper proposes the creation of Chemical Engineering Gym, an all-purpose reinforcement learning software toolkit for chemical engineering process synthesis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.13265,
  title  = {Deep Reinforcement Learning for Process Synthesis},
  author = {Laurence Illing Midgley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.13265},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:50:41.407Z