Case-based reasoning for chemical engineering design

With current industrial environment (competition, lower profit margin, reduced time to market, decreased product life cycle, environmental constraints, sustainable development, reactivity, innovation…), we must decrease the time for design of new products or processes. While the design activity is marked out by several steps, this article proposed a decision support tool for the preliminary design. This tool is based on the case-based reasoning (CBR) method. This method has demonstrated its effectiveness in other domains (medical, architecture…) and more recently in chemical engineering. This method, coming from Artificial Intelligence, is based on the reusing of earlier experiences to solve new problems. The goal of this article is to show the utility of such a method for unit operation (for example) pre-design but also to propose several evolutions for CBR through a domain as complex as the chemical engineering is (because of its interactions, non-linearity, intensification problems…). During the pre-design step, some parameters like operating conditions are not precisely known but we have an interval of possible values, worse we only have a partial description of the problem. To take into account this imprecision in the problem description, the CBR method is coupled with the fuzzy sets theory. After a mere presentation of the CBR method, a practical implementation is described with the choice and the pre-design of packing for separation columns.