Homme: A Modelling Environment for Multiple Applications

Abstract

This article focuses on the modelling of complex industrial systems. Primarily, it establishes a new approach to the construction and maintenance of models using a modelling environment. The authors define the modelling environment concept and show the architecture, structure, and components of a new one called HOMME. The main components of the environment are the language, the structures that support the construction of the models, and the object-oriented database that allows the manipulation of complex models in order to retrieve the piece of information that is needed. An example of this is presented along with a description of the modelling environment, demonstrating the availability of a single model that can be used for multiple purposes or applications.

Key Words:

• Modelling
• complexity
• object-oriented
• heterogeneous

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Rodriguez

Ricardo Sanz has a PhD in engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Automatic Control Department. During the last few years, his work has concentrated on the design of large, complex controllers with heterogeneous information processing technologies: artificial intelligence, soft computing, black-board systems, real-time agent systems, and the like. He has been the main architect in several large-scale control projects. He is a member of IFAC's TC on “algorithms and architectures for real-time control systems,” OMG TC on “real-time distributed object systems,” and the POSIX.21 working group. His current interests are the design of large, intelligent, modular controllers based on composable technologies, the structure of artificial minds, and the use of patterns, ontologies, and frameworks as core technologies for control system construction.

R. Sanz

Manuel Rodriguez obtained his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. After working in an engineering company in Spain, he earned his Ph.D. in Control and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Chemical Engineering Department. He has been working in the modelling and simulation areas, interested in information and formalism integration and the application of AI techniques to chemical engineering. Some of his recent projects are using neural networks for physical properties estimation and the hybrid models definition for the Model.la environment (at MIT). His current work is related to a new reactive distillation process and plantwide control methodologies.