Model- Driven Engineering for Petrochemical Industry Automation

The definition of equipment and components of physical plants is a necessary step towards the development of simulation, control, and supervisory applications for the petrochemical industry. Often it happens that the same plant/equipment is (re)modeled on each application, thereby there is a waste-of-time on repetitive (re)design. Even though each software platform normally offers a different view of the same plant, it is desirable to have some kind of interoperability between them. This paper presents M4PIA, a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) infrastructure devoted for petrochemical industry automation. M4PIA allows representing industrial plants by means of different and interchangeable object-oriented models, providing means to perform automatic code generation from a plant specification for different software platforms. Currently, our work involves using M4PIA in high-level automation manouvers and plant simulations. The use of M4PIA is expected to result in less development time and costs, while it increases efficiency, maintainability, and reliability of the developed applications.