Modelling and control of engineering plant processes

With increasing scale and complexity of networked applications, the concept of system of systems has recently emerged. This paper introduces a new systems engineering approach that can be utilised uniformly to represent integrated static descriptions of systems and their behaviours along with control specifications. It avoids the multiplicity of views associated with object-oriented techniques. Its ontology is simpler in that it incorporates only a few notions: things, flows, and their stages and triggering. This paper demonstrates the advantages of the proposed modelling technique by producing a high-level systematic specification (comparable to such tools as process flow diagrams) and using this model to depict the management and control of a system. To demonstrate the viability of the model, it is applied to developing a diagrammatic description of processes in a water distillation plant. Copyright © The Author(s) 2018.