Integration Tools Supporting Cooperative Development Processes in Chemical Engineering
Simon M. Becker, Thomas Alan Haase, Bernhard Westfechtel, Jens Wilhelms · 2002
Development processes in chemical engineering involve many engineers who are dealing with different working areas. They use tools that produce heterogeneous documents. For instance, one engineer creates a process flow diagram (PFD) with a tool like Comos PT. Another engineer has to simulate parts of this chemical process using a simulation tool like Aspen Plus, using a document describing the simulator input and producing a document containing the simulator output. A lot of dependencies exist between the documents created in development processes. For example, the simulator input file has to be consistent to the selected part of the PFD. In current development processes, these dependencies and the resulting consistency relationships have to be handled manually by the engineers without appropriate tool support. Some tools exist that allow the generation of one document out of other documents but at each generation step the target document is overwritten, and all changes applied to it are lost. We are developing tools that explicitly model the inter-document relationships . Moreover, they work incrementally, i.e., only those parts of the target document are altered that depend on parts of the source document that were modified. In this paper we describe the resulting tools and their benefit for chemical engineering.