A knowledge-based engineering approach for offshore process plant design

The competitive advantage in today´s offshore process plant engineering depends heavily on short design times and the ability to present stakeholders with a satisfactory level of detail quite early in the project. This study, as an initial milestone project for a PhD project, aims to investigate the use of knowledge-based engineering as a possible approach in order to help reduce design time and as a collaborative environment. Collaboration with engineers from Aker Solutions helped discover challenges involved with this task and existing methodologies were assessed. Inherent differences between product and process-oriented design were identified as a challenge along with the formats in which knowledge is transferred during the design process. It was found that existing umbrella methodologies for developing such applications are, mostly, product and not process-oriented. They also show a sequential nature that could potentially be a limiting factor in a case study implementation. Therefore, the development of an ad-hoc methodology is suggested for future work.