Reinforcement learning for distillation process synthesis using transformer blocks

A reinforcement learning framework is developed for the synthesis of distillation trains. The rigorous Naphtali-Sandholm algorithm for equilibrium separation modeling was implemented in JAX and coupled with the benchmarking Jumanji RL library. The vanilla actor-critic agent was successfully trained to build distillation trains for a seven-component hydrocarbon mixture. A transformer encoder structure was used to apply self-attention over the agent�s observation. The agent was trained on minimal data representation containing quantitative component flows and relative volatility parameters between present components. Training sessions involving 5�104 episodes (3�105 column designs) were typically run in under 60 minutes. While training was fast and reliable with appropriate tuning of the hyperparameters, further improvements are needed in the generalizability performance for similar separation problems.