Optimal purchasing of raw materials: A data‐driven approach

Abstract An approach to the optimal purchasing of raw materials that will achieve a desired product quality at a minimum cost is presented. A PLS (Partial Least Squares) approach to formulation modeling is used to combine databases on raw material properties and on past process operations and to relate these to final product quality. These PLS latent variable models are then used in a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) or mixed integer …