An ontology-based environment for effective collaborative and concurrent process engineering

Facing global competition in the chemical industry particular companies from high-wage countries have to cut development costs and time to market to be still profitable. Therefore, methods like concurrent and collaborative engineering are increasingly applied. However, these complex workflows require adequate software support to be efficient in face of heterogeneous software environments as typically encountered in most companies. Such software support does virtually not exist in industrial practice to date. In this paper, we propose a novel software prototype built on semantic technologies which is capable of providing such software support and thus helping to improve efficiency in process and plant engineering.