PROCESS SYSTEMS-ENGINEERING - HALFWAY THROUGH THE FIRST-CENTURY

The area of chemical engineering which has become known as Process Sys tems Engineering developed initially out of the availability of a tool , the high-speed digital computer. Coincidentally, 50 years ago, compu ters appeared for the first time, and as they became more generally av ailable and useful, chemical engineers were amongst the first to recog nise and exploit their potential for large scale calculations. Most of the efforts of early process systems engineers were focused on circum venting the limitations of early computers, particularly their lack of speed and of storage capacity to handle the very large problems whose solution was an ultimate aim. Over the last few years these constrain ts have practically vanished. However, some of the discipline's most i mportant long-term achievements have come in the form of a better unde rstanding of large-scale concepts; these have resulted from the need t o analyse and decompose problems and procedures so that they might be accessible to computing machines of limited capacity. This has also ma de them more accessible to we human computing machines of likewise lim ited capability. The first half century of process systems engineering was dominated by mathematics. Over the next half century, mathematics will be taken for granted, and emphasis will shift to information and understanding: how it can be represented, captured, accessed, transfe rred and exploited. The ability to perform very large numerical calcul ations in a simple and routine manner will encapsulate the mathematica l achievements of the last 50 years and make them accessible to all ch emical engineers. Future research can thus concentrate on new areas. T he current ready availability of computers is already having a major e ffect on the way in which all chemical engineers and scientists work. In the future, computers will become not just available, but ubiquitou s, providing instantaneous access to the sophisticated mathematical an d informatic tools which have been and will be developed. It is diffic ult to predict the impact of this ubiquity, and any prediction is like ly to be an underestimate. Still harder to assess are the consequences of not just the power and ubiquity of computer tools, but their conne ctivity. This will provide fast, worldwide connection between computer software and computer users on an unprecedented scale, and seems like ly to create a qualitative change in the way in which engineers will u se creatively their expanding range of powerful tools.