In today's economy, chemical engineering must respond to the changing needs of the chemical process industry in order to meet market demands. The evolution of chemical engineering is necessary to remain competitive in global trade. The ability of chemical engineering to cope with managing complex systems met in scientific and technological problems is addressed in this paper. Chemical engineering is vital for sustainability: to satisfy both the market requirements for specific end-use properties of products and the social and environmental constraints of industrial-scale processes. An integrated system approach of complex multidisciplinary, non-linear, non-equilibrium processes and phenomena occurring on different length and time scales is required. This will be obtained due to breakthroughs in molecular modelling, scientific instrumentation and related signal processing and powerful computational tools. The future of chemical engineering can be summarized by four main objectives: (1) Increase productivity and selectivity through intensification of intelligent operations and a multiscale approach to process control; (2) Design novel equipment based on scientific principles and new production methods: process intensification; (3) Extend chemical engineering methodology to product design and engineering using the "triplet 3PE molecular Processes-Product-Process Engineering" approach; (4) Implement multiscale application of computational chemical engineering modelling and simulation to real-life situations from the molecular scale to the production scale. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.