Model-driven engineering infrastructure and tool support for petrochemical industry automation

Abstract

The definition of equipment and components of physical plants is a necessary step towards the development of simulation, control, and supervisory applications for the petrochemical industry. Often it happens that the same plant/equipment is (re)modeled on each application, causing a waste-of-time on repetitive (re)design, besides introducing potential inconsistencies between the models. Moreover, even though each software platform normally offers a different view of the same plant, it is desirable to have some kind of interoperability between them. This paper presents a solution for such issues named M4PIA, which consists in a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) tool support developed mainly for petrochemical industry automation. M4PIA allows representing industrial plants by means of different and interchangeable object-oriented models, providing means to perform automatic code generation from a plant specification for different software platforms. Currently, our work involves using M4PIA in high-level automation manouvers and plant simulations. Evaluations studies performed with M4PIA shows that it covers most features expected from a MDE tool suite. Besides, the use of M4PIA is expected to result in less development time and costs, while it increases efficiency, maintainability, and reliability of the developed applications.