“…Unit operations (e.g., chemical synthesis and separation) are basic steps of chemical processes (Green & Perry, 2008). AI has been applied to improve the performance of specific unit operations, such as combustion (Zheng et al., 2009; Zhou et al., 2005), distillation (Ochoa‐Estopier et al., 2013; Osuolale & Zhang, 2016, 2017), evaporation (Verma et al., 2017), compression (Qi et al., 2018), and reaction (Fernandes, 2006; Mosavi et al., 2019; Schweidtmann et al., 2018). Some studies focused on technical indicators such as yields (Fernandes, 2006; Geng et al., 2016; Keyvanloo et al., 2012; Schweidtmann et al., 2018), while the others focused on risk‐related performance (Guo et al., 2009; Jaderi et al., 2019; Qi et al., 2018) and intelligent control of unit operations (Ji et al., 2016).…”