Computer-aided synthesis of complex pump and valve operations

Systematic Synthesis of Cleaning Procedures for Pipeline Networks Using Petri Nets

“…The pipeline network described in Foulkes et al(1988) is adopted here as a realistic example to demonstrate the capability of the proposed method. The network contains 8 storage tanks, 36 valves and 4 pumps (see Figure 8).…”

“…The concept of the piping fragments (Foulkes et al, 1988) is adopted in this work for this purpose. In particular, a fragment is defined as a collection of pipeline branches and/or processing units separated from other fragments by the valves, pumps and other means of flow blockage in the pipeline network.…”

“…All of them are concerned with the operating procedures for material transfer in pipeline networks. The most relevant work was published by Foulkes et al (1988). They represented the states of fragments in a plant structure with a series of condition lists.…”

Planning plant operating procedures for chemical plant

“…Previous OPS work in chemical engineering either dealt with valve sequencing alone (Foulkes et al, 1988), or planned the operation of reaction vessels to the exclusion of valve sequencing (Fusillo and Powers, 1987). CEP is the first OPS system to combine both.…”

“…The implication of this work is that some difficult problems are best solved through the development of domain dependent modules that live within otherwise domain independent planners. The algorithm used by the OPS community to create a flow of chemical is based on Foulkes et al (1988). It applies a maze searching algorithm; the valves around this route are closed and then the valves along the route are opened.…”