Recent advances in process systems engineering

A crucial success factor in a technology driven market is coupled with the ability to understand and interpret new technologies expeditiously and convert this knowledge into a competitive advantage. In the search for procedures to advance corporate know-how faster, mathematical modeling is becoming an indispensable tool. The new challenge for systems research is to create a new breed of computer-based technologies for assistance and/or partial automation of the creative modeling process. Meta-modeling is a modeling paradigm for rapid computer-aided model generation of large multi-scale systems in industrial practice. It proposes model building by means of phenomena-oriented modeling languages. Using the domain-specific language concepts, users compose process models by specifying the physical and chemical phenomena in a fully declarative fashion. Automatic interpretation of the high-level concepts of the model application leads to an equivalent set of system equations. Computer-aided model generation enables engineering teams to formulate highly structured process models in short amount of time. It also focuses the modeling effort onto the fundamental principles governing a process model without the need for explicit coding of all constitutive and balance equations. This article discusses recent advances and open challenges for computer-aided model generation