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A hierarchical approach for the redesign of chemical processes

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Abstract

An approach to improve the management of complexity during the redesign of technical processes is proposed. The approach consists of two abstract steps. In the first step, model-based reasoning is used to generate automatically alternative representations of an existing process at several levels of abstraction. In the second step, process alternatives are generated through the application of case-based reasoning. The key point of our framework is the modeling approach, which is an extension of the Multimodeling and Multilevel Flow Modeling methodologies. These, together with a systematic design methodology, are used to represent a process hierarchically, thus improving the identification of analogous equipment/sections from different processes. The hierarchical representation results in sets of equipment/sections organized according to their functions and intentions. A case-based reasoning system then retrieves from a library of cases similar equipment/sections to the one selected by the user. The final output is a set of equipment/sections ordered according to their similarity. Human intervention is necessary to adapt the most promising case within the original process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Information Technology, CINVESTAV, Ciudad Victoria, Mexico

    I. López-Arévalo

  2. Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    R. Bañares-Alcántara

  3. Department of Computing, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    A. Aldea

  4. Engineering and Science Research Centre, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Morelos, Mexico

    A. Rodríguez-Martínez

Authors
  1. I. López-Arévalo
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  2. R. Bañares-Alcántara
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  3. A. Aldea
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  4. A. Rodríguez-Martínez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to R. Bañares-Alcántara.

Additional information

I. López-Arévalo received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Technical Institute of Tapachula, Mexico in 1998. He did a specialization in computer science at the Center for Computing Research of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Mexico City, Mexico in 1999. In March 2006, he obtained the Ph.D. degree from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. He was the recipient of a doctoral studentship and is a member of the Research Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Department of Computing Engineering and Mathematics at the University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain. Currently, he is a researcher at the Laboratory of Information Technology of Cinvestav in Mexico. His research interests include model-based reasoning, case-base reasoning, and knowledge representation.

R. Bañares-Alcántara has worked in the University of Oxford since October 2003 and is now a Reader in Engineering Science in the Department of Engineering Science and a Fellow in Engineering in New College. He previously held a readership at the University of Edinburgh and lectureships at Tarragona (Spain) and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He obtained his undergraduate degree from UNAM and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Starting with his postgraduate research work at CMU, his research interests have been in the area of process systems engineering, in particular in design and synthesis of chemical processes. He has developed a strong relationship with computer science/artificial intelligence research groups in different universities and research institutes, with current research also linking to social and biological modeling. He has (co)authored more than 100 refereed publications and has been a principal investigator and researcher in several projects funded by EPSRC and the European Union.

A. Aldea graduated in 1988 from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics. She then undertook research in Edinburgh for 9 years at Heriot-Watt University first as a Ph.D. student and later as a Postdoctoral Researcher. In 1999, she took a Lecturer position at the University Rovira i Virgili (Spain) where she began working with multiagent systems (MAS) and their application to social agents. In 2003, she moved to UK and started working as part-time Lecturer in the University of Reading. Finally she joined Oxford Brookes University full-time in September 2004 and is now a Senior Lecturer. In 1999, she helped create a multi-disciplinary research group, formed by computer scientists and engineers, which worked on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to industrial problems. She was involved in projects related to MBR, MAS, knowledge-management, ontology-based information retrieval, and simulation of human social behavior during team work.

A. Rodríguez-Martínez received the B.Sc. in chemical engineering in 1993 from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), Mexico. For the period March 1995 to January 2000 he was a researcher in the Department of Supervision and Automatization of Electrical Research Institute, Mexico. From 2000 to 2005, he was a Ph.D. student of Process Design and Synthesis Group, University Rovira i Virgili, Spain. The main topics of his Ph.D. dissertation include the retrofit of chemical processes based on hierarchical representation. Currently (June 2005 to date), he is an Associate Research-Professor in the Engineering and Science Research Centre (CIICAp) at UAEM. His research interests include artificial intelligent methodologies applied to design, synthesis, and retrofit of chemical processes.

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López-Arévalo, I., Bañares-Alcántara, R., Aldea, A. et al. A hierarchical approach for the redesign of chemical processes. Knowl Inf Syst 12, 169–201 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-006-0060-4

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