A knowledge based application to enhance fired heater design

This paper describes meaningful issues related to the development of a Knowledge Based (KB) application to automatically configure fired heater for a chemical plant. It concerns a typical example of product technical configuration. The paper discusses differences between commercial and technical configuration and motivates potentialities of KBE approach in the domain of chemical plant design. In the developed application, the automation of the configuration process is based on two different models: the first one for the plant components, while the second for the design process. This choice has been done because the design of a fired heater, such as many other products, requires the execution of specific design tasks and in parallel the definition of the product architecture. In detail, the product architecture is represented by a tree structure while the configuration process by a list of activities with possible iterations. The paper describes the product and process formalization as well as the most relevant aspects of the implementation activity. The KB application demonstrates how the use of simple data structures can help to solve complex technical problems.