Road to a Common Byte
Abstract
The automation of sharing process data among computer programs, databases and suppliers through electronic data exchange helped reduce the costs incurred in information management and eventually led to greater productivity. This has been the experience of companies in the chemical process industries which investigated the amount of time wasted in manual information transcription. Computers exchanging data seamlessly among themselves has been proven effective in freeing engineers from those tedious tasks and letting them focus on real engineering tasks. However, its implementation in chemical engineering practice was not that remarkable due to complex engineering applications, hard-to-encode data, and the variability of hardware and software used. Fortunately, an evolving standard was set up by the ISO to standardize the mechanisms for describing product data. Called STEP or the Standard for the Exchange of Product model data, it currently consists of several projects covering various stages of product life cycle. Some of those projects are presented. Steps in developing a data model to step up the standardization effort are also presented.
Recommended Citation
N. L. Book et al., "Road to a Common Byte," Chemical Engineering (New York), vol. 101, no. 9, pp. 98 - 110, Sep 1994.
Department(s)
Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
0009-2460
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2024 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Sep 1994