Integrated Modelling of Process Operation Systems Using the Agent-Oriented Approach

Abstract

W ith the development of information technology and economic globalization, process industries tend to be more networked and digitized. It is inadequate for the researchers to pay attention only to the energy fl ow or material fl ow in production processes. More efforts are concentrated to transform various production factors into information and integrate the information to optimize production process and the whole supply-chain (Aoyama and Naka 2003). As an important part of the supply-chain, it is signifi cant for process industries to incorporate the different process operations, ensure process industries rapidly response to market demands, while at the same time, continually striving for higher productivity, environmental regulation and low cost. Process operations include real-time simulation, on-line optimization, fault diagnosis, process monitoring, etc. In recent years, there are several software and tools to aid the process operation, which are called as the kind of computer aided process operation (CAPO). Unfortunately, these software and tools are designed for individual process operation separately, such as fault diagnosis, having not considered the process operation systems as a whole. At the same time, these software are developed with different program language and run on different operation systems or hardware platforms. These factors make the existing CAPO systems may not collaborate effi ciently.For the past years, several software and computer tools have been developed to aid the chemical process operations including real-time simulation, on-line optimization, fault diagnosis, process monitoring, and many other functions. These tools were designed separately and did not collaborate effi ciently, making it diffi cult to integrate different engineering tasks for the optimal process operation. In this paper, an agentoriented modelling approach is presented to address this problem. Elements in the process operation systems are divided into two classes. One class consists of equipment, units and processes, while the other class consists of production operation tasks. The two classes of elements are modelled as objects and agents, respectively. Then, three strategies are presented to implement the integration of the whole process operation system, which are integration of object models, integration of agent models and supervision of operator. Also presented is a case study of integration of process operation decision optimization and abnormal situation management using the proposed agent oriented approach for TE challenge problem.Ces dernières années, plusieurs outils informatiques et logiciels ont été mis au point pour faciliter les opérations des procédés chimiques, notamment la simulation en temps réel, l'optimisation en ligne, le diagnostic de défauts, la surveillance des procédés et de nombreuses autres fonctions. Ces outils étaient conçus séparément et ne coopéraient pas effi cacement, rendant diffi cile l'intégration des différentes tâches d'ingénierie en vue du fonctionnement optimal des proc...

Notice of Retraction: Process system integration with the application of web service and STEP standard

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