On automated design in chemical engineering

Design support in chemical engineering is typically connected with the configuration of the technical devices that realize a chemical process. In fact, the configuration step is rather a finishing job within the entire design process, and several hurdles have been taken by the designer before. This paper outlines both an idea and a methodology to realize a design support right from the start of the design process. The central element of the methodology is the abstraction of a chemical process as a graph along with the use of graph grammars, which encode an engineer's design knowledge. By applying graph transformation rules, an incompletely and coarsely defined design can be completed and refined towards a desired solution.