In many areas of technology, process complexity has increased tremendously over the last few years, often defying the use of traditional synthesis and control methods. Hierarchical approaches are a possible solution to this dilemma. They rely on decomposing the overall problem into sub-problems and reassembling their solutions in a hierarchical structure. Sub-problems are solved using process models of different abstraction levels: higher-level, long-term decisions are taken on the basis of a coarse model of the overall process; whereas lower-level, short-term decisions stem from detailed models of individual process units.

Although this is an extremely intuitive philosophy, a systematic and mathematically sound strategy only exists in its rudimentary forms. The essential objective within the described project area is the further development of this strategy in order to increase practical applicability, and to apply available results to solve challenging large-scale problems in practice.