Development Environments for Complex Product Models

Abstract: The complexity in developing high-tech industrial artifacts such as power plants, aircrafts etc. is huge. Typically for these advanced products is that they are hybrids of various technologies and contain several types of engineering models that are related in a complex fashion. For power plant design, there are functional models, mechanical models, electrical models etc. To efficiently meet new demands on environment friendly technology, models of product life cycles and environmental calculations must be brought into the product designstage. The complexity and evolution of software systems for such advanced product models will require new approaches to softwareengineering and maintenance. This thesis provides an object-oriented architectural framework, based on a firm theoretical core on which efficient software development environments for complex product modeling systems can be built.The main feature of the theory presented in the thesis, is that the software engineering models of the engineering application domain(e.g. power plant design) are separated from software implementation technology, and that source code for the basic functionality for object management and user interaction with the objects in the product modeling system is generated automatically from the software engineering models. This software engineering technique has been successfully used for developing a product modeling system for turbine- and power plantsystem design at ABB STAL, using state of the art database technology.When software products of the next generation of engineering database and user interface technology are made commercially available, a product modeling system developed according to the theory presented in the thesis can be re-implemented within a small fraction of the effort invested in developing the first system.The product modeling system was put into production in 1993. It is now regularly used by about 50 engineers. More than 80 steam andgas turbine plants and several PFBC power plants have been designed using the system.