Differences and relations of objectives, constraints, and decision parameters in the optimization of individual heat exchangers and thermal systems

Performance improvement of heat exchangers and the corresponding thermal systems benefits energy conservation, which is a multi-parameters, multi-objectives and multi-levels optimization problem. However, the optimized results of heat exchangers with improper decision parameters or objectives do not contribute and even against thermal system performance improvement. After deducing the inherent overall relations between the decision parameters and designing requirements for a typical heat exchanger network and by applying the Lagrange multiplier method, several different optimization equation sets are derived, the solutions of which offer the optimal decision parameters corresponding to different specific optimization objectives, respectively. Comparison of the optimized results clarifies that it should take the whole system, rather than individual heat exchangers, into account to optimize the fluid heat capacity rates and the heat transfer areas to minimize the total heat transfer area, the total heat capacity rate or the total entropy generation rate, while increasing the heat transfer coefficients of individual heat exchangers with different given heat capacity rates benefits the system performance. Besides, different objectives result in different optimization results due to their different intentions, and thus the optimization objectives should be chosen reasonably based on practical applications, where the inherent overall physical constraints of decision parameters are necessary and essential to be built in advance.

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice:Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science,and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science（including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems） on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context. This work is dedicated to Jianer Chen, one of the strongest problem solvers in the history of parameterized algorithmics,on the occasion of his 60 th birthday.