RESP - Roundtrip engineering of recipes for batch and continuous processes of the process industry by means of synchronization networks

Project information

Duration: 04/2020-03/2022

Leader: Julian Rahm

Founding: BMBF (Software Campus) Projektwebseite

Partner: Merck KGaA

Project description

A process engineering manufacturing specification is usually created in laboratory tests and is continuously developed and brought to production maturity. To ensure reproducible product qualities, a recipe is created that describes the manufacturing process of the product in detail. However, the recipe and its process parameters must be scaled up, enriched and adapted for the productive plant when the product is transferred. The transfer of a recipe to the different levels such as laboratory automation to a master or control recipe is still a major challenge due to the different requirements and equipment of the respective environment. This is because the manual adjustment of process parameters and setpoints in the respective plants is based on empirical values and many secondary conditions that cannot always be mapped uniformly. This leads to lengthy start-up processes, which cause corresponding costs. Changes to process parameters or setpoints in the individual cycles and levels must also be transferred to all other recipes to ensure consistency across all levels. In order to accelerate this change process and to make it traceable, and thus to be able to react more flexibly to market or customer requirements, this project adapts the round-trip engineering concept known from software development to the problem mentioned. With this concept, a network between the levels is created in order to be able to transfer changes to each corresponding recipe. This is to ensure the consistency of the individual recipes among each other over their entire life cycle or to create possibilities to restore this consistency.