A Plant Documentation Information System Design

Traditional systems do not have the descriptive ability to represent the complex, multi-faceted nature of complex documentation structures such as engineering systems descriptions. This has led to significant information management difficulties in maintaining documentation which reflects, in a consistent and up-to-date way, the current state of the documentation systems. The formal method has been widely recognized as a precise way to define the structure of a complex documentation system. In this paper, a formal approach to model petrochemical plan information is presented. The motivations of using formal methods in the design of a heterogeneous documentation management system are described. The paper focuses on the issue of using formal specification to clarify our understanding of the problem and as a basis for the design of a multipurpose documentation supporting tool, which can link different databases and provide users different modelling methods to support the operations of complex document structures.