Integral Management of Process Plants Systems through their Lifecycle using a Model-Based Engineering Approach

Nowadays we find ourselves in what is called the fourth industrial revolution: Industry 4.0. This revolution is being fostered in many countries to get a more competitive industry. Industry 4.0 target is to make more efficient and flexible plants, reduce times and costs of process and products lifecycle. Under this framework, models appear as a core component in every new development. Model-Based Systems Engineering is a methodology that allows for traceability and guarantees model consistency covering the entire lifecycle of the system. The objective of this work is to develop a holistic model of a process plant. Such model will be available during the entire lifecycle of the system (process + product) communicating in every stage with the specific (existing) tools used to develop it. In this paper, we present the development of the SysML model of a process plant (the production of ethylbenzene from benzene and ethylene), the architecture and the methodology to transform the central model to application-specific ones. We also explain how to execute these specific models from the core model keeping consistency between models and data.