Performance analysis and optimal temperature selection of ethylene cracking furnaces: A data envelopment analysis cross-model integrated analytic hierarchy process

Abstract Ethylene is an important raw material of industrial products, and the performance analysis of ethylene cracking furnaces in the petrochemical industry is affected mainly by the temperature. Therefore, this paper presents a performance analysis and optimal temperature selection method of ethylene cracking furnaces using the data envelopment analysis cross-model (DEACM) integrated analytic hierarchy process (AHP) (DEACM-AHP). The DEACM avoiding the unreasonable weight distribution of input-output factors can accurately identify and estimate the performance status and the optimal temperature of ethylene cracking furnaces. Meanwhile, the improved AHP based on the entropy weight can comprehensively consider the reasonable weight allocation of each input-output index and obtain the consistent fusion result of ethylene cracking furnaces with different temperatures. And then the optimal production benchmark with different temperatures is obtained based on the DEACM again. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to the performance analysis and optimal temperature selection of the SL-I type naphtha cracker model in the petrochemical field. The experimental result shows the proposed method can guide the ethylene production system to reduce energy consumption and improve energy efficiency.