Partial Matching of Large Scale Process Plant Models Using Random Walk on Graphs

3D process plant models(PPMs) in the process industry normally consists of thousands of components. And, there are many similar local structures in the PPM. Due to the complex process flow, the topology relationship among components is very complicated. Therefore, designing a new PPM is quite time consuming. In order to shorten the design cycle, content based model retrieval for PPMs is an imperative requirement. In this paper, we propose a partial matching framework for PPMs based on graph matching aiming at improving design efficiency and realizing design reuse. The random walk algorithm is employed to distinguish similar local structures. Specifically, each PPM is represented by an undirected labeled graph. The local topological feature of each component is extracted based on the random walk algorithm. For partial matching, a subgraph isomorphism algorithm is introduced. The matching process is accelerated by using the local topological feature to generate an optimized initial state and alleviate the computation of feasible rules. Experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of our matching framework.