EPEE - A SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT FOR PROCESS ENGINEERING SOFTWARE

This paper describes epee, a distributed environment for the integrati on of software applications. It was developed with the aim of aiding t he process of design by providing the necessary support for a design i nformation management system. The software environment is first descri bed in general terms and then our specific application of epee to proc ess engineering design is presented. epee uses an object-oriented appr oach to data management. Data are represented as objects whose definit ions, via templates, reflect the process engineering design environmen t. The use of focussed methods promotes a consistent look and feel to the tools in the environment. Method reuse reduces software developmen t costs and increases users' confidence in the reliability of the meth ods. The benefits of the history recording mechanism in epee and its o bject publishing facilities are described. A history record is a criti cal component of a high level design management system. This, together with the sharing of data through object publishing, provides the nece ssary support for collaborative design. The application of epee to pro cess engineering design illustrates the benefits of object-oriented te chniques to the process systems and design community. The inherent ext ensibility of object definitions facilitates the application of the su pport system to any area of design. The dynamic nature of object defin itions in epee encourages exploration and experimentation with new dat a types and methods. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd