A concurrent engineering environment for chemical manufacturing

Design and operation of process plants are now dominated by constraints imposed by safety, environmental impact, waste minimization, 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 involves a large number of activities carried out by teams of engineers which draw on a variety of technologies that rely on diverse types of information 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 making. This paper describes the architectural and functional characteristics of a computer integrated concurrent engineering environment for life cycle chemical manufacturing which allows project teams to work over a heterogeneous computer network. Emphasis is placed on the key implementation 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 catalytic cracking process, particularly in respect to the way the environment supports the project team.