Model-based Systems Engineering with Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams

Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID) are derivations of process flow diagrams and are used to provide a schematic representation of plants with respect to the system description, system flow and control logic. The bulk of toolsets supporting process modeling for technical process plants developed from special purpose orientated needs in the industry. The key research topic of this thesis is to elaborate an approach to reuse or extend the concepts of well known general purpose modeling languages (SysML) in the field of software- and systems-engineering to provide a more sophisticated modeling method for P&IDs. The first aim and prerequisite for further research is to analyze the key concepts and characteristics of graphical notations in the domain of Piping & Instrumentation. A proper mapping from equipment, connectives and constraints in P&IDs to the meta-model of SysML should be found. Furthermore all aspects of incompatibility and workarounds concerning the mapping to an abstract model should be part of this result. The next part involves an UML Profile implementation of P&IDs in Enterprise Architect (EA). EA is being developed by Sparx Systems and is a so-called End-to-End Modeling Tool. The outcome should be an elementary support of graphical concrete syntax (creation of diagrams) of P&IDs, consisting of graphical symbols, connectives and compositional rules by implementing a plugin for EA. Based on the implementation of P&ID as an UML-Profile in EA, it comes do determine the advantages and new perspectives due to the representation of Piping & Instrumentations systems as an concrete model in SysUML with respect to the capabilities of EA.