PlantDesign - prototypical implementation of an integrated engineering tool

Abstract This contribution presents a novel integrated engineering tool PlantDesign, which harmonizes multi-disciplinary engineering tasks during the plant life cycle in process industries. Hereby the focus is on heterogeneous software interoperability and the data handover between different software and disciplines to enable a consistent data management and an integrated planning workflow during the basic and detailed engineering. PlantDesign is an assistant system for the automated, constructive design of plant modules with a high level of detail and it enables different data exchange interfaces to heterogeneous CAE software tools applied in basic and detailed engineering. This article highlights the newly developed source code converter framework enabling the source code generation in PlantDesign for different 3D CAD formats and tools, the integration of the PlantDesign software into the classical engineering workflow of process development and the first successful demonstration of the practicality of this new approach for an industrial application.