Plant engineering: Modeling and design of topological coupling aspects in a computer aided environment

Abstract

When designing a plant for continuous or semi-continuous processes, such as paper pulp or petrochemical production systems, engineers face very complex tasks, which are only in part supported by software tools. Engineering is an expensive task in itself, but the consequences of bad engineering are even worse, resulting, for instance, in the loss of a couple of production weeks. Information systems supporting the engineering activities play a critical role in minimizing errors and delays, thus maximizing the quality and the economic return of the plant. Computer-supported tasks require the concurrent participation of multiple designers. The design task complexity is compounded by its interdisciplinary character: the engineering system has to assure design consistency between teams with different specialties that must work as freely as possible. This paper analyses the problem, proposes the rcad software architecture and describes partial implementation results. The architecture, which is based on a simple yet powerful conceptual model, combines low-cost commercially available packages with relatively little custom-written software. Its features are nowadays either supported by very expensive or very specialized integrated packages, or separately performed by largely disintegrated database managers, drafting systems and other software.