AN INTEGRATED GRAPHICAL USER-INTERFACE FOR A CHEMICAL-ENGINEERING DESIGN SUPPORT SYSTEM

KBDS has been proposed as a prototype design support system and target ed to be used by a team of cooperating designers during the design of chemical plants. The development of a graphical user interface for KBD S has been one of the intermediate objectives. Within KBDS, a knowledg e representation model has been proposed to maintain and use a history of the design process. It consists of six closely interrelated types of objects: projects, metaschema, schema, units, items of equipment, a nd variables. The interface was designed to make those objects and the ir relations easily accessible for examination and manipulation. It is composed of three subsystems: The Top Window that acts as a system ma nager; the Scheme Hierarchy that displays the structure of the design history; and the Flowsheet Tool that provides a graphical representati on of alternative designs. Objects shown by the interface are active i n the sense that they are associated to a set of behaviours as respons es to mouse events (e.g. moving, displaying a menu, invoking a browsin g window). The interface is fully integrated with the underlying knowl edge representation system, and allows flexible navigation through the various parts of the design structure. It was implemented using the o bject-oriented paradigm, and its open architecture eases the access an d integration to other applications.