Symbolic Computing and Artificial Intelligence in Chemical Engineering: A New Challenge

In the area of chemical process development and design, computers are used for process simulation and analysis; equipment sizing and costing; optimization; integrated design of energy management systems, reactor networks, and separation sequences; layout of piping networks; and project planning. Research in chemical engineering science relies very heavily on numerical simulation of postulated physical and chemical models to reveal behavior that is hard to capture through experimentation or to complement experimental evidence. Quite often, the exclusion of available qualitative and approximate-quantitative knowledge is detrimental because the user either overlooks fundamentally sound scientific knowledge or distorts such knowledge to fit it into a quantitative representational scheme. Artificial intelligence and symbolic computing are expanding the scope of engineering problems in which computers can play an important role. Computers offer much more than simple number crunching, and artificial intelligence research leads the way in exploiting this untapped potential.