An integrated graphical user interface for a chemical engineering design support system

KBDS has been proposed as a prototype design support system and targeted to be used by a team of cooperating designers during the design of chemical plants. The development of a graphical user interface for KBDS has been one of the intermediate objectives. Within KBDS, a knowledge representation model has been proposed to maintain and use a history of the design process. It consists of six closely interrelated types of objects: projects, metaschema, schema, units, items of equipement, and variables. The interface was designed to make those objects and their relations easily accessible for examination and manipulation. It is composed of three subsystems: The Top Window that acts as a system manager; the Scheme Hierarchy that displays the structure of the design history and the Flowsheet Tool that provides a graphical representation of alternative designs. Objects shown by the interface are active in the sense that they are associated to a set of behaviours as responses to mouse events (e.g. moving, displaying a menu, invoking a browsing window). The interface is fully integrated with the underlying knowledge representation system, and allows flexible navigation through the various parts of the design structure. It was implemented using the object-oriented paradigm, and its open architecture eases the access and integration to other applications