Dr. José Miguel Laínez is currently Research Associate in the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. His research is focused on the application of modeling and optimization techniques to provide support in decision making processes. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya where he started working in research and development of novel methods and techniques in the area of enterprise integrated supply chain design and management with emphasis in robust, sustainable solutions and procedures for decision-making support, a field of relevance for both engineering academics as well as professional practitioners in the process systems engineering and operations research area. He participated in a number of international (“Towards Knowledge-Based Processing Systems-PRISM”, Combinatorial techniques for the scheduling of complex batch chemical systems) and national (Sistema de Soporte Avanzado para Procesos de Fabricacion Flexible en la Industria Quimica y Petroquimica (ToleranT)) projects. As the result of his research activity he has produced 15 peer reviewed articles, 3 book chapters and around 30 presentations in international congresses related to supply chain modeling and optimization.Dr. Luis Puigjaner has been Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) for 46 years of a basic process design course for engineers and an advanced course in process design and optimization for PhD students. Since 1986 he started an additional research line on Process Systems Engineering (PSE). Since then, several projects have been carried out under his leadership in PSE activities (29 European Commission sponsored projects; 22 national projects financed by the Spanish government; 35 contracts with the private industry). As a result of this activity 35 Ph.D. Thesis have been completed in PSE domain of which 24 were related with the topics of this book have been realized under his supervision, 151 peer reviewedarticles in top indexed journals (71 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been published in indexed journals, 230 book chapters (113 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been written and 281 presentations (143 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been made at International Symposia. Commercial software was developed (MOPP) and exploited by a spin-off company (BOLD). Under Professor Puigjaner auspices, two pilot plants (CIMNE and PROCEL) were built for software testing purposes. Applications have been made to the polymers, textile, sugar, food, bier pharmaceutical industrial sectors, phosphoric acid and robot manufacturing.
