A decision support system for power plant design

The design of power plants requires a balanced study of three major considerations, namely: the decision about the plant lay-out (choice of components and their dispositions); the planning of the plant operational requirements (provision for maintenance and upratings); and the variation of external conditions, like changes on energy costs or on the demand rates, for instance. These three aspects must be jointly dealt with, considering both quantitative and qualitative classifications which cover economic and technical requirements of the project design. The available tools for design and simulation of power plants, provide support for technical quantitative analysis. However, they do not support the design qualitatively. In this paper, we propose to incorporate a decision support system in a power plant simulation tool, in order to provide the qualitative synthesis needed for the plant design process, and also to assist the design engineers in performing a better choice-evaluation of the aspects described previously. The paper describes the system's specification and initial implementation details within the simulation framework of IPSEpro, a programmable integrated process simulation environment from SimTech.