Conceptual design based on superstructure optimization is a complex task that neither commercial simulators nor dedicated modeling and optimization environments like GAMS, AMPL, and AIMMS are able to perform well by themselves: the first lack interfaces to state-of-the-art solvers, the latter do not provide accurate thermodynamic models. While previous research shows that GAMS can be interfaced with an external thermo engine, this interfacing requires additional C ++ code, whose manual generation and consistent implementation is tedious, making the approach both error prone and impractical for larger design problems. By using MOSAICmodeling as a modeling environment, this shortcoming of the existing approach is eliminated by automatically generating all code needed for interfacing GAMS with an external CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic property package.
