Abstract
Industrie 4.0 is a project in the high-tech strategy of the German government to promote the computerization of traditional industries such as manufacturing. Other countries have similar programs.
Industrie 4.0 changes the cooperation of enterprises and the relationships of the company to its customers significantly. The company's success increasingly depends on the competence of the company to use software properly.
Not only the life cycles and the understanding of quality in the software industry and in process engineering come into conflict. Software ranges from the MS-Excel spreadsheet of the individual engineer over more or less closely associated applications of all sizes through to the group-wide integrating SAP R/3. At the interfaces of software, knowledge stocks of different domains (semantics) with their standardizations and with potentially different meanings collide.
In process design and development, chemical engineers use MS-Excel and process simulators to create process flow diagrams (PFDs), piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), equipment data sheets and heat and mass balances. Manufacturers typically use their own programs for the design of the equipment. Starting with the basic design or the following detailed design, asset management systems network and coordinate all the crafts involved in the planning and operation of a plant across sites and across the entire life cycle of the plant.
Various organizations, associations and initiatives such as Namur, Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI), DEXPI, ISO 15926, CAPE-OPEN and others have begun to describe the requirements for data structures and the interchangeability of data records between CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) systems.
The paper shows in four examples from chemical engineering how various programs connect to a chemical process simulator through the existing interfaces. MS-Excel plays an important role in almost all cases. From these examples, course of action for process engineering, for computer science and for management derive.
