AN INTELLIGENT DESIGN ENVIRONMENT FOR CONCEPTUAL PROCESS DESIGN

Conceptual process design is a multiagent, distributed problem-solving activity that can be significantly enhanced with the aid of several i ndividual intelligent systems. It is quite difficult to develop such i ntelligent systems on the basis of existing expert-system shells becau se of the complexity of conceptual process design. In this paper, the characteristics and requirements of conceptual process design are firs t analyzed, and then an intelligent design environment (Meta-COOP) for conceptual process design is presented. Meta-COOP is based on object- oriented programming (OOP) techniques and coded in C++. This environme nt provides such distinct features as the integration of various knowl edge-representation and inference methods, and deals with multimedia i nformation. An intelligent system for the conceptual design of heat ex changer networks (IDIS-CDHEN) provides an application of this intellig ent design environment, and a demonstration of its methodology.