Towards the Application of Formal Methods in Process Engineering

ABSTRACT. Process engineering deals with the design, operation and optimization of different physical processes such as chemical reactions, biological mechanisms and petroleum processing. Recent technological advancements and short time to market in almost every industry bring new challenges and hence the complexity in the process engineering systems. One of the main techniques to analyze such models is to represent underlying systems using signal-flow-graphs which provide a systematic procedure to evaluate the system performance in the form of transfer functions. Traditionally, the analysis of signal-flow-graphs based models has been carried out by the paper-and-pencil based proofs and numerical techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of using theorem proving to formally analyze processing engineering models. The main motivation of this work is twofold: First, the application of formal methods in new domain to improve the analysis accuracy; Second, an effort to reduce the gap between formal methods and different engineering communities such as mechanical, chemical and engineering management.