Knowledge Representation and Planning Strategies for Batch Plant Operating Procedure Synthesis

Synthesis of operating procedures for batch plants involves systematic generation of step by step instructions which the operator can implement to manage the batch plant safely and optimally. This is a labor and knowledgeintensive task. It often takes weeks of effort by experts to prepare a clear and error free set of instructions even for a moderately complex plant. If this process is automated, it would be possible to develop operating procedures and control sequences more efficiently and accurately. This paper proposes a knowledge-based framework for this problem. The proposed framework has been implemented in Gensym’s object-oriented expert system environment called G2. The salient features of the framework have been tested on a real-life pharmaceutical case study and the results are found to compare favorably with the operating procedures that were developed by the experts