Determinacy and Concurrency Issues in Process Engineering

Abstract

The goal of creating high-quality process systems for real-world applications leads to the need for an engineering approach to process system development. The development of process engineering as a distinct discipline can be greatly facilitated through the development of an engineering framework that supports the rigorous engineering of process systems.

Reliability, cost and timeliness are key attributes of quality for engineering artifacts, independent of the specific engineering discipline. As a result, attention to these and other related issues of process system quality during process system design is viewed as necessary if order to achieve desired levels of quality in the resulting process systems.

The task system model, a task-based process formalism that can serve as the basis for a process engineering framework, is described. Extensions to this model that are specifically intended to address process system reliability and parallelism are introduced. Process system reliability is addressed through the introduction of methods to ensure determinacy among concurrently executing tasks of a process system that share resources.

Process system operating costs and execution timeliness are addressed by maximizing parallelism to the extent that reliability is not compromised.