Design of a multi-disciplinary and feature-based collaborative environment for chemical process projects

Currently, the lack of interoperability across different engineering disciplinary domains remains a big issue in industrial practice, such as those major chemical process projects. Detailed engineering information is mainly exchanged verbally or, to a very limited extent, manually by technical documents, and hence the interdisciplinary dependencies, especially those tedious and error-prone references across domains, are not well maintained. The interoperability is hindered by the heterogeneous domain models used, and engineering semantics are not well maintained during the project lifecycle. This paper attempts to solve the informatics interoperability issue by proposing an inter-domain functional feature framework based on the associative feature mechanism and the exploration of commonalities of product and process models between chemical and mechanical domains. The schemas of feature models are developed explicitly to represent the characteristics of multi-domain entities and flows, while a mapping mechanism is realized to support inter-domain information sharing. Inter-feature relations are systematically managed so that the intricate engineering knowledge is incorporated into design tasks. The prototype software developed shows that design conflicts can be detected by the system intelligently; and the effectiveness towards engineering consistency management is promising.