Towards an Integrated Environment for the Early Stages of Process Design

The objective of the EPIC project is to develop an off-line Computer-Aided-Design environment, assisting engineering teams involved in the design of complex plants. These teams belong to different fields such as chemical process engineering, control systems engineering, instrumentation engineering and optimisation. Techniques from all these engineering fields are integrated into a coherent conceptual framework and en- bodied into a software prototype, through the application of modern software engineering tools and methods.