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2008
Book Article
Titel
Using developers' experience in cooperative design
Abstract
The process industries are characterized by continuous or batch processes of material transformation with the aim of converting raw materials or chemicals into more useful and valuable forms. The design of such processes is a complex process itself that determines the competitiveness of these industries, as well as their environmental impact. Especially the early phases of such design processes, the so-called conceptual design and basic engineering, reveal an inherent creative character that is less visible in other engineering domains, such as in mechanical engineering. This special character constitutes a key problem largely impacting final product quality and cost. As a remedy to this problem, in cooperation with researchers and industrial partners from chemical and plastics engineering, we have developed an approach to capture and reuse experiences captured during the design process. Then, fine-grained method guidance based on these experiences can be offered to the developer through his process-integrated tools. In this section, we describe the application of our approach on the case study of the IMPROVE project. We first report on experiments made with a prototypical implementation of an integrated design support environment in the early project phases, and successively describe how it has been reengineered and extended based on additional requirements and lessons learned.