پشتیبانی اطلاعات مرکزی شده و جریان کار از طراحی فرایندهای چشم انداز بهبود

Design process excellence is considered a major differentiating factor between competing enterprises since it determines the constraints within which plant operation and supply chain management are confined. The most important prerequisite to establish such design process excellence is a proper management of all the design process activities and the associated information. Starting from an analysis of the characteristics of chemical engineering design processes, some important open research issues are identified. They include the development of an integrated information model of the design process, a number of innovative functionalities to support collaborative design, and the a-posteriori integration of existing software tools to an integrated design support environment. Some of the results obtained and experiences gained in the last years in the collaborative research center IMPROVE at RWTH Aachen University are presented. Gadget timed out while loading

The markets and hence the requirements on manufacturing in the process industries have been changing tremendously in the last decades. Growing market volume and limited, often largely local competition have been dominating manufacturing in the seventies and eighties. Today, the process industry is facing largely saturated markets in many geographical regions of the world. Internet technology has been successfully used in e-commerce solutions to achieve almost complete market transparency. Engineering and manufacturing skills are available globally. At the same time, transportation cost have been decreasing significantly. Hence, every manufacturer is facing truly global competition. Economic success is only possible, if new ideas can be quickly transformed into new marketable products or if the production cost of established products can be diminished substantially to counteract decreasing profit margins. Product innovation, process design as well as manufacturing processes have to be continuously improved to reduce time to market of a new product, to minimize manufacturing cost and to establish a high level of customer satisfaction by offering the right product at the right time and location. 1.1. Two business processes The value chain in any manufacturing oriented industry comprises two major business processes—manufacturing and design—which are highly interrelated ( Schuler, 1998). These business processes are constrained by the socio-economic environment, in particular, the market, the legislation and the available process technologies ( Fig. 1).Value creation happens in the manufacturing process ( Fig. 1, top), which is part of a supply chain including warehouses, distribution and procurement in addition to the production plants. Excellence in manufacturing is not possible without explicit consideration of the constraints and potentials resulting from interaction between the plant and the supply chain it is embedded into. The influencing factors from the supply chain on plant operation have to be exploited rather than rejected by model-based plant management considering all the manufacturing business processes across the whole supply chain ( Backx, Bosgra, & Marquardt, 1998). The changing business environment can be addressed on a short time scale by adapting supply chain management and plant operation strategies for a fixed design. The manufacturing process is largely determined by the second business process, the design process, which comprises all the activities related to the design of a new product and the associated production plant including the process and control equipment as well as all operation and management support systems ( Fig. 1, bottom). This business process starts with an idea on a new product and subsequent product design. Conceptual design, basic and detail engineering of the production plant are the major activities which follow, before the plant can be built and commissioned. Excellence in design requires consideration of the complete design lifecycle ( Marquardt, Wedel, & Bayer, 2000). In particular, the interactions between different design lifecycle phases focusing on different aspects such as the chemical product, the process concept, equipment design, plant layout, or control structure selection need to be exploited. Only an integrated consideration facilitates the realization of synergies and the achievement of the true economical potential. The plant and the supply chain have to be continuously reengineered during their lifetime in order to adjust manufacturing to major changes in the market conditions and legislation, to adopt new process technologies and to profit from accumulated operational experience. Asset management is increasingly established to make best use of existing facilities and to support preventive maintenance and benchmarking activities. Plant reengineering is only possible on a longer time scale as compared to an adaptation of the manufacturing process for a given plant and supply chain design. 1.2. Value creation The economic performance of an enterprise heavily relies on the quality of the products of these two business processes. Typically, the major focus is on the product of the manufacturing process, namely the chemicals, which are sold to customers and therefore are considered to generate the revenue to the enterprise. The manufacturing process and its associated supply chain, however, are considered as the cost generators. Profit can be increased on the short time scale with limited investment, if the manufacturing cost can be reduced by optimized strategies for plant operation and supply chain management. It is therefore not surprising, that the current industrial focus is on the reduction of manufacturing cost in order to counteract decreasing profit margins. This strategy does not seem to be sustainable in the long run, since cost reduction by means of better supply chain management and plant operation using existing assets is largely independent of a certain product portfolio and does not contribute to a fundamental understanding of the processing technology and its impact on chemical product characteristics. The employed operations research techniques apply to many businesses and may therefore evolve in a technological commodity. After a transition period during which these technologies are adopted, the differentiation between competitors with respect to manufacturing excellence vanishes. Hence, at least at this point in time, there is no adequate appreciation of the contribution of design excellence to the overall success of an enterprise. It is the design process which determines the design of a manufacturing plant. This design is largely responsible for the achievable quality of the chemical product and for the order of magnitude of the production cost. The design also constrains the operational envelope and hence the flexibility to react to changing market conditions. Ideally, an integrated consideration of plant and supply chain design on the one and supply chain and plant management on the other hand should be addressed ( Backx et al., 1998). However, such an approach would have to generalize and extend the problem of an integrated design and control of a single plant, which itself has not yet been solved satisfactorily. We hypothesize that design excellence is becoming a major differentiating asset in the future which, to a large extent, will decide on the economical success of an enterprise. Of course, for this hypothesis to be true, design has to be interpreted in a broader than the traditional sense. In particular, not only the process flowsheet and equipment, but also the operation support system as well as the chemical product itself have to be considered part of the integrated design business process. The quality of the design process is strongly depending on the available knowledge about the chemical process and products and its long-term management. We claim that design excellence in addition requires a profound understanding of the integrated design process itself. Design excellence has to be based on a systematic acquisition, management and reuse of such knowledge. It forms the basis for identifying shortcomings in available knowledge and established work processes. It is therefore a prerequisite for design process reengineering to establish better process design practices. Clearly, information technology support and model-based design process integration are key enablers. Together with a deep understanding of the design process, they are the major pre-requisites for the implementation of a suitable software environment to support the activities in the design process in an integrated manner. This perspective of the design process is not entirely new. It has been stressed in a similar way by a few other research groups, most notably those at Carnegie Mellon University (Subrahmanian, Westerberg, & Podnar, 1991; Konda, Monarch, Sargent, & Subrahmanian, 1992; Finger, Konda, & Subrahmanian, 1995; Westerberg, Subrahmanian, Reich, Konda, & the n-dim group, 1997; Davis et al., 2001) and at the University of Edinburgh (Banares-Alcantara, 1991 and Banares-Alcantara, 1995; Banares-Alcantara & Lababidi, 1995; Costello et al., 1996). 1.3. Overview on the paper In the following we focus in this paper only on a part of the design process, namely to the early phases of the chemical process design lifecycle, the conceptual design and front-end engineering, for pragmatic reasons to avoid excessive complexity. Further, we believe that many of our findings will carry over to the more complicated integrated design and manufacturing problem. Certainly, this problem is much more complex and presents additional requirements and challenges for information technology support. However, the key issues in the chemical process design process as discussed in Section 2 are also relevant for the integrated design and manufacturing problem. Current chemical process design shares a lot of commonalities with the design practice in other industrial domains. The assessment of the chemical process design process in the next section holds almost equally well for other engineering design processes. In that sense, our findings seem to be relevant not only for chemical engineering design and manufacturing. On the basis of the assessment in Section 2, key research questions are formulated and the interdisciplinary research center IMPROVE is introduced subsequently in Section 3. Sections 4 to 6 present major results of the research work of IMPROVE and the experience made in the areas of information modeling, design environment architecture and tools supporting collaborative work processes.

This contribution has attempted to show that information technology support of engineering design processes (not only in the chemical process domain) is a complex and far reaching problem. It goes well beyond the classical problem of data exchange or of data centered integration of tools to a design environment. IMPROVE addresses this problem area in a long-term project. The objective of the research work is the clarification of work process oriented support of engineering design by means of information technologies. This objective is considered to be the guiding paradigm of the research work and determines the concrete research projects in the center to a large extent. Some of these research issues together with results obtained and experience gained have been summarized in this contribution. Despite the long-term and fundamental research focus of IMPROVE, some of the concepts and technologies have already reached a level of maturity which is sufficient to start transfer into industrial practice in focused joint research and development work with the software and end user industries.