Heat exchanger networks (HENs) are a useful method of reducing the energy costs and environmental impact of industrial processes. Therefore, many papers focusing on solving HEN design problems efficiently have been published in the last years and several techniques have been proposed for their solution. The high complexity of the problem has led to an increment in the number of papers that use metaheuristics to solve it. The main reason is the capability of metaheuristics to handle complex problems in a feasible computational time. Additionally, this approach can easily take into account investment costs, and it offers more flexibility in the definition of the objective function and problem restrictions. In this paper, we review the most relevant papers that use metaheuristic techniques to resolve the HEN design problem. We also propose a method for grouping the different analyzed metaheuristics. It is based on a series of characteristics that allows the correct characterization of the different approaches.

No abstract