Incremental and Interactive Integrator Tools for Design Product Consistency

Abstract

Design processes in chemical engineering are inherently complex. Various aspects of the plant to be designed are modeled in different logical documents using heterogeneous tools. There are a lot of fine-grained dependencies between the contents of these documents. Thus, if one document is changed, these changes have to be propagated to all dependent documents in order to restore mutual consistency.

In current development processes, these dependencies and the resulting consistency relationships have to be handled manually by the engineers without appropriate tool support in most cases. Consequently, there is a need for incremental integrator tools which assist developers in consistency maintenance. We realized a framework for building such tools. The tools are based on models of the related documents and their mutual relationships. Realization of integrators and their integration with existing tools is carried out using graph techniques.