A Decomposition Approach to Characterizing Feasibility in Acyclic Multi-Unit Processes ⁎ ⁎ This work is co-funded by Eli Lilly & Company through the Pharmaceutical Systems Engineering Lab (PharmaSEL) and by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP-SRC) as part of its Prosperity Partnership Programme under grant EP/T518207/1.

The ability to certify feasibility in process design and process operations is crucial in many applications. This includes quality-by-design in pharmaceutical manufacturing, where a key element is the characterization of the design space to better understand the links between materials, processes and products. Sampling-based approaches are versatile but they are cursed by dimensionality, which currently limits their application to problems in a few process variables only. We propose a decomposition approach that enables feasibility characterization for nominal settings of uncertain parameters in acyclic multi-unit processes by sampling. Our methodology leverages problem structure to decompose unit-wise, and deploys surrogate models to couple the resultant subproblems. We demonstrate it on a serial, batch chemical reactor network. In future research, we will extend this framework to cyclic multi-unit processes and the presence of parameter uncertainty.