AUTOMATING OPERATING PROCEDURE SYNTHESIS FOR BATCH PROCESSES - PART I- KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND PLANNING FRAMEWORK

Automating the synthesis of operating procedures for batch processes i s very valuable as plant personnel often spend considerable amount of time and effort in preparing and verifying them for correctness and co mpleteness. Towards this goal, a framework for automating operating pr ocedure synthesis for batch processes is proposed in this paper. We pr opose an approach based on Grafcet, a discrete event modeling concept, to represent procedural knowledge combined with an object-oriented re presentation of the declarative knowledge. Grafcet is also used to mod el the information; called inferred knowledge, that is incrementally g enerated during operating procedure synthesis. The details of the basi c components and the advanced features of Grafcet that make it a suita ble technique for modeling the procedural and inferred knowledge are p resented. A hierarchical planning strategy is proposed that uses the d eclarative and procedural knowledge to generate the inferred knowledge incrementally, which leads to the synthesis of the operating procedur es. The implementation of this framework and its application to an ind ustrial case study are presented in Part II. (C) 1998 Published by Els evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.