Similarity concept for case-based design in process engineering

The design process requires significant engineering experience, intuition and creativeness. To facilitate the preliminary design, the authors have proposed approach based on the re-use of design experience. The design problems in chemical engineering are often quite difficult to represent as a well-structured list of features of one-type data. Many problems in chemical engineering are very large and complex, the problem description is often incomplete and uncertain, and sometimes it changes dynamically. In order to cope with design cases that have different structure representation the general similarity concept has been developed. The paper surveys the existing mathematical methods for similarity measurements and extends them to cope with different data formats. The main idea of this paper is an integration of representation and retrieval of the cases into one step. The proposed concept is illustrated by the examples of the model selection for synthesis of distillation systems and formulation of a fats and oils product.