Process System Engineering Modeling: A Software Engineering Perspective

MELINA VIDONI; ALDO VECCHIETTI; MARIA LAURA CÚNICO

Orlando

Congreso; AIChE Annual Meeting; 2019

In Process System Engineering it is frequent to develop Operational Research (OR) models (mathematicalmodels) to solve complex problems of production processes (synthesis, design, planning, scheduling,etc.). Many of these models are performed in companies where the mathematical programs must belinked to enterprise Information Systems (usually ERPs) to get data and return results. Since the problemsto solve are complex, the modeler focuses in the mathematical formulation, the algorithms, looking for fastresponse time and consistency on the behavior; aspects related to software development are missed.Software attributes like usability, maintainability, reliability, security, etc. are disregarded in the models(Henning, 2017) because, in general, they are not considered as a software system.Software Engineering (SE) is the area that proposed several accepted, tested methods dealing withdevelopment and implementation of informatic systems. In the last decade, due to the need of shortertime-to-market and the changing requirements environment, agile methodologies (AM), founded in theAgile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001) have been proposed, which have been widely accepted in theSoftware Engineering community.In this work, it is tackled two issues related to the development and implementation of mathematicalmodels having a large program life cycle. First, guidelines to adapt agile methods to manage mathprogram projects are presented considering that mathematical program interventions, as well assoftware developments, have common stages and similar information evolution. On the other hand,since it is frequent that OR models must be modified because of new requirements or changes in thetargeted problem, a key quality attribute to be considered is maintainability. To cover this attribute, it isproposed a set of simple techniques to include in the models and measures and indicators to check ifsaid qualities have been achieved. These concepts are exclusively developed for OR and are based oninternational standards in SE, such as ISO/IEC 25010 (ISO/IEC, 2011), and the tactics proposal fromthe Software Engineering Institute (Bachmann et al., 2007).