Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

6Data‐Centric Process Systems Engineering for the Chemical Industry 4.0

Marco S. Reis and Pedro M. Saraiva

Synopsis

Process Systems Engineering (PSE) has now made over 50 years of contributions to chemical engineering, mostly related to the exploitation of computational power to make better plants and products (e.g. safer, more efficient, with higher quality or smaller environmental fingerprints). Although never neglecting the power of data, one must, however, recognize that PSE has emerged and evolved closer to the paradigm of chemical engineering science, and the corresponding view that first‐principles models were the way to push chemical engineering forward. Therefore, PSE has been, to no small extent, essentially a deductive discipline that makes use of well‐established knowledge from industrial systems and mechanistic models to deduce the best designs for equipment, processes, and products, as well as the optimal operation policies and conditions to be adopted.

However, the fourth industrial revolution is taking its course and making the hidden potential for improvements and competitiveness contained in the immense variety of data streams readily available to be processed and analyzed very clear, namely in the Chemical Process Industries (CPI). This context creates the necessary conditions to further develop and adopt powerful inductive approaches that complement the traditional deductive practices. Therefore, this may also be the right time to rethink and update the paradigms, ...