A Concurrent Engineering Environment for Chemical Manufacturing

Design and operation of process plants are now dominated by constraints imposed by safety, environmental impact, waste minimiza tion, cost effectiveness, controllability, and operability over the complete product and process life cycle including market analysis, conceptual and detailed design through to commissioning, operation, and disposal of products and decommissioning of the plant This means it inevitably in volves a large number of activities carried out by teams of engineers which draw on a variety of technologies that rely on diverse types of informa tion having complex data structures and relationships which must be shared by team members and integrated through computer based software packages Conflicting goals, uncertainty, and multiple solutions are crucial elements of these activities which are essentially about decision mak ing This paper describes the architectural and functional characteristics of a computer integrated concurrent engineering environment for life cy cle chemical manufacturing which allows project teams to work over a heterogeneous computer network Emphasis is placed on the key imple mentation issues with specific attention being paid to STEP-based chemical process data modelling, information sharing and communication, and distributed agent cooperation. The benefits this approach can bring are illustrated by considering the revamp design of a refinery fluid cata lytic cracking process, particularly in respect to the way the environment supports the project team