How to program power plant cogeneration optimization?

Hello All, I'm new to MATLAB and I don't know how to approach the following problem: I need to program optimization for co-firing coal with biomass and I need to minimize environmental pollutants such as NOX, SOX, ash, and maximize heat rate in BTU. would that work through multiobjective optimization? but the description says it's mostly for minimization. I'm very confused. Please help!

Answer 1

[Shashank Prasanna]

Without more information about the exact variables and the objective function its hard to give a specific answer, but yes if you have more then one objective to be satisfied (or your objective function outputs is vector valued) then optim and global optim offer couple of multiobjective solvers such as fgoalattain, fminimax, gamultiobj etc.

If you want to maximize instead of minimizing then just flip the value of the objective function by throwing in a negative sign at the output of the objective function.

http://www.mathworks.com/help/optim/multiobjective-optimization.html http://www.mathworks.com/help/gads/multiobjective-optimization.html