Automatic Generation of a Lifecycle Analysis Model from a First Principles Industrial Process Simulation Model

Model driven development of industrial process control systems has received extensive interest from the industrial informatics community. Another area of active interest has been the use of simulation of industrial processes in conjunction with control system design. However, the importance of sustainable development and environmental footprints are becoming increasingly important for the process industry, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the established technique for this purpose. LCA is currently being performed manually by a corps of engineers unaware of recent developments in industrial informatics. Thus LCA is a cumbersome process that cannot be integrated into a model driven development philosophy. This can significantly undermine the benefits from model driven development, since the outcome of LCA may result in significant change requests to the process design and consequently to the control system design. These problems could be overcome, if LCA could be brought under the scope of model driven development. This requires that the LCA model could be generated automatically into the LCA tool. This is feasible, since process designers ofter develop a first principles process simulation model that has the required information. This paper presents a methodology for automatic LCA model generation from a first-principles simulation model.