Graph based method for the synthesis of operating procedures in process plant

A graph based approach is described for the automatic synthesis of operating procedures in process plants. Plant physical structure and material-conversion processes are independently modeled by directed graphs, respectively. The problem of operation procedure synthesis is to find path of material conversions from raw materials to the target material and to allocate each process on a specific equipment. Subgraph-isomorphism search algorithm is utilized to solve the problem. In this study, this framework is extended to handle energy-conversion processes. The method is successfully demonstrated on the operations of a double effect evaporator.