Debottlenecking is highly desirable to increase the production throughput for the oil sands industry. In this work, the bottleneck identification and capacity expansion problem is solved through optimization techniques. In the proposed debottlenecking procedure, first-principles method and Gaussian process modeling approach are applied to build process models. Depending on the type of process model used, the optimization problem is solved either as a parametric linear programming problem or as a nonlinear optimization problem. By solving the optimization problem, the bottlenecks can be identified and the necessary capacity expansion for process units for bottleneck removal is reported. The proposed method is demonstrated through applications in oil sands production process.

中文翻译：

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油砂提取厂的瓶颈消除：一种优化方法

为了增加油砂工业的生产产量，非常需要去瓶颈处理。在这项工作中，通过优化技术解决了瓶颈识别和容量扩展问题。在提出的去瓶颈过程中，采用第一性原理和高斯过程建模方法来建立过程模型。根据所使用的过程模型的类型，可以将优化问题解决为参数线性规划问题或非线性优化问题。通过解决优化问题，可以确定瓶颈，并报告用于消除瓶颈的过程单元所需的容量扩展。通过在油砂生产过程中的应用证明了该方法的有效性。