To realize process integration of CIMS for modern pulp and paper industry

How to realize process integration of CIMS for the modern pulp and paper industry is the main topic of the paper. Firstly, obvious and potential benefits of PI are summarized and the main stages to develop CIMS are given. For pulp mills, several production scheduling/optimization problems are listed, their objectives and solutions are given out and functional sub-systems are listed. For paper mills, the similar scheduling/optimization problems, their solutions and several cases are discussed. Then, the main functions and modules of the mill wide energy management system are listed and mill level functions of integrated pulp and paper mills are simply discussed. Next, PI methods are classified and discussed, which includes pinch technology, mathematical programming, hierarchical analysis, knowledge based systems, exergy analysis and stochastic search methods. Some conclusions are drawn and information integration and a case study are shown as further research topics.