Toward automatic generation of control structures for process flow diagrams with large language models

Journal Article (2023)
Author(s)

E.J. Hirtreiter (TU Delft - ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)

Lukas Schulze Balhorn (TU Delft - ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)

A.M. Schweidtmann (TU Delft - ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)

Research Group
ChemE/Product and Process Engineering
Copyright
© 2023 E.J. Hirtreiter, L. Schulze Balhorn, A.M. Schweidtmann
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.18259
More Info
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Publication Year
2023
Language
English
Copyright
© 2023 E.J. Hirtreiter, L. Schulze Balhorn, A.M. Schweidtmann
Research Group
ChemE/Product and Process Engineering
Issue number
1
Volume number
70
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Abstract

Developing Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) is a crucial step during process development. We propose a data-driven method for the prediction of control structures. Our methodology is inspired by end-to-end transformer-based human language translation models. We cast the control structure prediction as a translation task where Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs) without control structures are translated to PFDs with control structures. We represent the topology of PFDs as strings using the SFILES 2.0 notation. We pretrain our model using generated PFDs to learn the grammatical structure. Thereafter, the model is fine-tuned leveraging transfer learning on real PFDs. The model achieved a top-5 accuracy of 74.8% on 10,000 generated PFDs and 89.2% on 100,000 generated PFDs. These promising results show great potential for AI-assisted process engineering. The tests on a dataset of 312 real PFDs indicate the need for a larger PFD dataset for industry applications and hybrid artificial intelligence solutions.