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