On 16-21 November 2008, the annual meeting of the AIChE was held in the historical city of Philadelphia, USA. Scientists and practitioners from around the world gathered here to present a wide range of topics. Deciding what talk to attend among the many that occur simultaneously was a very difficult task!
The first session I attended was on Advances in Process Synthesis, with contributions from R. Smith (Manchester) on Heat and Energy Integration and C. Pantelides (Imperial/PSE) on the role of modelling in the risk management of novel processes. The day continued and I attended different sessions from Computers in Operations (dynamic optimisation, planning and scheduling) and Flow Assurance (characterisation of waxes and heavy oil crudes). The next day, I attended talks in the Advances in Computational Methods and Numerical Analysis session, in particular, the presentation by I. Bonis and C. Theodoropoulos (Manchester) about model reduction and the optimisation of iterative solvers which is my own particular interest. I also attended some presentations in the Advances in Optimisation session (bi-level programming, noisy optimisation).
In the afternoon, I delivered my talk on mode-based optimisation of flow assurance operations. A couple of people questioned me regarding future work and some practical implications, and found I needed to elaborate further on my presentation. On Wednesday, I attended the session on Complex and Networked Systems with a motivating talk by E. Ydstie (Carnegie Mellon) on a new approach on systems modelling. In the afternoon, several sessions were interesting such as the Modelling and Control of Diseases, Control of Energy and Environmental Processes and the Multi-scale Modelling and Materials Processing. The evening was cold but this did not put me off sightseeing.
On the last day, I attended several presentations on Systems Biology and attended one of my favourite sessions: Modelling, Reduction and Control of Distributed Parameter Systems, with high-calibre presentations from P. Christofides’ group, and A. Armaou’s group.
In general, this meeting was a very enjoyable opportunity to discover different research directions. I appreciated the support that SCI provided.
Eduardo Luna-Ortiz
Imperial College London
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