A CONCURRENT ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT FOR CHEMICAL MANUFACTURING

Design and operation of process plants are now dominated by constraint s imposed by safety, environmental impact, waste minimization, cost ef fectiveness, controllability, and operability over the complete produc t and process life cycle including market analysis, conceptual and det ailed design through to commissioning, operation, and disposal of prod ucts and decommissioning of the plant. This means it inevitably involv es a large number of activities carried out by teams of engineers whic h draw on a variety of technologies that rely on diverse types of info rmation 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 decis ion making. This paper describes the architectural and functional char acteristics of a computer integrated concurrent engineering environmen t 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-b ased chemical process data modelling, information sharing and communic ation, and distributed agent cooperation. The benefits this approach c an bring are illustrated by considering the revamp design of a refiner y fluid catalytic cracking process, particularly in respect to the way the environment supports the project team.