Economic, environmental and societal concerns are three integral components of industrial sustainability. Process safety and security has significant impact on these three dimensions. To enhance the sustainability of the chemical process, the economic, environmental and safety objectives needs to be achieved simultaneously. Moreover, various uncertainties occur throughout process design and operation in the form of manufacturing variations, material property variations, market fluctuation, etc., which makes the task more difficult.

Gani et al. developed a methodology for the design of sustainable processes via systematic generation & evaluation of alternatives. This work attempts to extend the prior research in this field and develop a generic and systematic methodology to enhance the sustainability of chemical process. The search of the optimal sustainability enhancement strategy is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem under uncertainty. The economic, environmental and safety performance of the process are quantified by a set of indices widely accepted in US chemical industries. The effect of uncertainty is expressed as a certain level of reliability for the optimal solution. A three-step optimization approach is utilized in this work. The effectiveness of this methodology is demonstrated by a case study.