Plantwide

Plantwide refers to strategies and practices applied across an entire manufacturing plant to optimize performance rather than focusing on individual units or processes. In industrial engineering and operations research, the term commonly denotes plant-wide optimization and control that coordinates process design, operations, scheduling, and energy management across multiple units, utilities, and streams.

Plantwide approaches aim to achieve global objectives such as minimizing operating costs, maximizing throughput, improving energy efficiency, and maintaining product quality under shared constraints. Methods include mathematical programming and dynamic optimization, sometimes implemented with decomposition techniques to manage complexity. Model predictive control and hierarchical control structures are often extended plant-wide to coordinate fast-acting unit controls with slower, high-level decision making.

Applications span chemical plants, refineries, food and beverage processing, pharmaceuticals, and other asset-intensive industries. Plantwide strategies may address steady-state and dynamic performance, startup and shutdown planning, maintenance scheduling, and heat integration. They frequently involve integration of process models, energy systems, and utilities, enabling coordinated decisions on design changes, operating setpoints, and production scheduling.

Benefits of plantwide optimization include reduced energy consumption and emissions, lower operating costs, improved product consistency, higher throughput, and better resilience to disturbances. Challenges include increased computational complexity, data quality and integration requirements, model accuracy, and change management. Successful implementation typically relies on cross-functional collaboration, robust data infrastructure, and scalable algorithms that can bridge unit-level details with plant-level objectives.