Extended product modeling and decision revision management for collaborative environment in chemical process design

Abstract

Design of chemical processes is now dominated by constraints imposed by safety, environmental impact, waste minimization, cost effectiveness, controllability, and operability over the complete product and process life cycle. This means it inevitably involves a large number of activities carried out by teams of engineers who draw on a variety of technologies that rely on diverse types of information having complex data structures and relationships which must be shared by team members and integrated software packages. Conflicting goals, uncertainties and multiple solutions are crucial elements of these activities which are essential about decision making. In this study collaborative design environment has been focused in order to achieve concurrent engineering which attempts to provide such a comprehensive integrated approach by taking whole advantages of group work based on free and complete exchange and access to information required by everyone involved in the project team as it is required. The collaborative design environment can be implemented properly by accomplishing three different layers as main keys. They are extended product model considering design process, decision revision management for design optimality, and distributed design environment based on the product model and the revision management. Firstly, multi-dimensional approach for design process management based on product model and description of activity relations is explored. Parallelized design process for concurrent process engineering should be managed by two dimensional management design activity flows. The process management makes it possible to guide progress of design processes in a helix structure by performing horizontal and vertical activity control simultaneously. That can be achieved based on an extended product model, which represent various design perspectives explicitly from conventional design activity model. Dynamic features of the extended product model are expressed by a...