Challenges in the new millennium: product discovery and design, enterprise and supply chain optimization, global life cycle assessment

This paper first provides an overview of the financial state of the process industry, major issues it currently faces, and job placement of chemical engineers in the US. These facts combined with an expanded role of process systems engineering, are used to argue that to support the "value preservation" and "value growth" industry three major future research challenges need to be addressed: product discovery and design, enterprise and supply chain optimization, and global life cycle assessment. We provide a brief review of the progress that has been made in these areas, as well as the supporting methods and tools for tackling these problems. Finally, we provide some concluding remarks. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.