Information integration strategy of the petrochemical industry from the multi-scale perspective

The success of Computer Integrated Manufacturing System (CIMS) in petrochemical enterprises relies on correct and systematic research of enterprise integration, including information integration, function integration and software integration. The information integration is the foundation of the other two. However, traditional information integration methods find it difficult to work in the face of the diversity of plants and businesses in enterprises. Information integration must meet the need of cooperative control, management and optimization of production systems in CIMS, whose structure and operation features fundamentally determine the content, methods and form of the information integration. The production system should be regarded as a complex and dynamic network in terms of multi-scale and multi-level characteristic, which not only is consistent with the reality of process production, but also has high significance in the research of the information integration. In this paper, the concept of multi-scale physical structure model is first proposed based on the multiscale topology structure of the real material flow and the logic material flow of the petrochemical industry. Subsequently, an information integration framework for material flow and manufacture units is designed for convenience of model maintenance and model synchronization. An information modeling method is then proposed based on the multi-scale physical structure model. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a prototype system, which helps to analyze the validity of the information integration architecture in this paper.