The Barton Laboratory at MIT is conducting a broad program of research related to modeling, simulation, optimization and design of large-scale dynamic systems. Applications are drawn from the traditional chemical process industries, and from less traditional areas such as pharmaceutical and biochemical processes, micro-scale chemical processes, signaling in biological systems, complex chemical reaction mechanisms such as those in combustion systems, nuclear hydrogen generation, design of OLED displays and natural gas production, distribution and processing networks.

Our research interests and contributions include

• hybrid (discrete/continuous) dynamic systems;
• design and modeling of complex distillation systems;
• numerical analysis of ordinary differential, differential-algebraic and partial differential-algebraic equations;
• sensitivity analysis and automatic differentiation;
• pollution prevention in process design;
• mixed-integer and dynamic optimization theory and algorithms;
• process safety analysis;
• open process modeling software.