CASE-STUDY IN-PROCESS ENGINEERING TOOL INTEGRATION

One of the biggest problems facing the Process Engineering software in dustry is that of application integration - how to allow applications to be used together. Each application tends to stand alone and depend on its own private way of structuring data. From the engineer's point of view it would be better if all the applications co-existed within a common environment and information could be moved between them at wil l. We have approached this problem from the point of view of KBDS, a d esign support system for chemical plant design. KBDS would benefit fro m the use of other packages within the context of a design. One tool w hich attempts to provide a solution to the problem of tool integration is epee. It provides an application-neutral object-oriented view of p rocess engineering data and applications. We have integrated KBDS with epee and extended it to make use: of some of the tools which are avai lable via epee. One of them is cHiPs, a flowsheet synthesis package. W e have also integrated ASPEN PLUS(TM) into epee to make it available t o KBDS. We discuss the issues related to the integration of tools into KBDS via epee and the requirements to support the use of high level t ools in the design process.