Production economics, once dominated by efficiency factors or cost-effectiveness ratios, have been incorporating inventory reduction, flexibility and quality improvement as additional factors. But production also has to take account of environmental control. If a linkage of these production concepts with the methodical approaches of an optimised production will be successful, high efficiency reserves can be activated. In this work a prospective and perspective view is given on the systematic methodologies currently developed and the software available that addresses the dominant current trends in the modeling, simulation and optimization of batch process industries, which represent the fastest growing segment of the process industries.