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2005
Conference Paper
Titel
Integrating workflow extensions into a process-integrated environment for chemical engineering
Abstract
Design is one of the most complex and creative tasks undertaken by chemical engineers. The early production stages of chemical design require an adequate support because of their critical impact on the competitiveness of the final products, as well as their environmental impact. In cooperation with researchers and industries from the chemical engineering domain, we have created an integrated flowsheet-centered environment for the support of the early stages of design. In order to address the global need for enterprise integration observed in today's highly competitive global economy, we had to make our system more aware of further organizational aspects of the executed processes. As a solution to this challenge, we integrated a number of workflow extensions into our environment. These extensions enabled it to provide its method guidance further across the inter- and intra-enterprise environment of our enacted processes, with the future goal of seamless inter-operating w ith other external systems of the overall enterprise environment. In this paper, after capturing the rationale behind the need for this integration, we successively describe the integrated environment and detail the extensions employed. Finally, we illustrate our approach on a small case study from our experience.