Towards an Integrated Environment for the Early Stages of Process Design

Summary

The objective of the EPIC project is to develop an off-line Computer-Aided-Design environment, assisting engineering teams involved in the design of complex plants. These teams belong to different fields such as chemical process engineering, control systems engineering, instrumentation engineering and optimisation. Techniques from all these engineering fields are integrated into a coherent conceptual framework and en- bodied into a software prototype, through the application of modern software engineering tools and methods.

At the second year of the project’s life, work within EPIC has produced a number of important products. These achievements concern the use and adaptation of advanced software engineering tools and the promotion of these in the CIM community and the creation of a generic database structure and of a common user interface, tailored to the requirements of process engineering activities.

EPIC has also produced foundations for an integrated approach to the design of process control systems. This led to advances in theoretical aspects of the analysis and synthesis of control systems for multivariable processes and to the specification of novel techniques for the optimisation of a plant’s operating conditions. At the same time, EPIC’s innovatine approach to process design, embodied in the workbench functionalities, is assessed through engagement in concrete industrial engineering case studies.