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The present work describes the product driven process synthesis (PDPS) methodology for the conceptual design of extraction of intact oil bodies from soybeans. First, in this approach consumer needs are taken into account and based on these needs application of the final product (oil bodies) is defined to use extracted oil bodies for food industry as natural antioxidant agents. Furthermore, we defined fundamental tasks followed by an appropriate mechanism to convert an input (soybeans) into a desired output (intact oil body structure). Based on these fundamental tasks logical alternative process flow sheet was generated. The most promising of these alternatives were experimentally tested. It has been found that ultrasound reduced the remaining insoluble fraction and increased the amount of solids (around 60 %) extracted into the aqueous phase which also resulted into higher protein extraction up to 26 %. This has a positive effect on the stability of extracted oil bodies.

Decisions in an oil refinery are made at three levels: planning, scheduling and control. Existing facilities have to be operated close to their maximum capacity, while continuously responding to cost fluctuations. In many of the currently reported planning models each decision level has its own model and is used separately. Integration of these models will lead to solutions closer to the optimum than modeling the decision levels separately. However, simply combining the levels into one model would lead to very large models that yet cannot be solved within reasonable time. To overcome the computational time issue a rolling horizon approach is proposed in this work.