EditIn brief
Dorchester Software was approached by an industrial compound manufacturing company, and asked to build a data management system which would hold data regarding Chemical Compatibility on a per process as well as Generic basis, and then for each process or product, generate the standard requirements of various compatibility Matrix charts, and Materials Safety Data Sheets (sometimes known as MSDS).
EditThe requirement functional requirement
A typical industrial chemical process involves a number of reactant chemicals, which are brought together in various combinations inside a construction that is designed to control the process. The component parts of such a construction is of course itself composed of compounds (so called "Materials of Construction") which may or may not have neutral or adverse results when brought into contact with the reacts of the process.
The combination of the reactants is done in a very specific way, and specific order, and in the meantime these reactants must be stored in more or less close proximity within the warehouse ready for use in the process. It is important to ensure that the reactants are brought together with other reactants that they have been deliberately chosen to react with, and not in the meantime allowed to cross contaminate with other things with which the reaction could be corrosive to the structure in some cases dangerous and even explosive.
Alarming news items of factory fires pumping toxic waste into the skies of a busy surburban area, or in even worse cases of tragedy exploding at the cost of many lives stand as testimony to how critical it is that these safety procedures are carried out accurately and consistently.
As a consequence, industrial process designers and architects are required to generate a number of chemical compatibility Matrix charts, which are then brought together with information from the chemical Manufacturer's Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), and are used to provide safety information to plant managers to ensure that dangerous, corrosive or explosive reactants are kept well away from each other.
For the process designer, the production of chemical compatibility Matrix charts and the associated diagrams, MSDS s, and accompanying literature is an ongoing chore.
Processes may be modified by the introduction of a single additional reactant, and then the production of these charts has to be done all over again.
In addition it is important to identify relevant information from non-relavant information. A crosstabulation chart showing a plant manager the consequences of every industrial chemical with every other would be huge, confusing, complicated and unusable. A method is needed to draw out from a database of all our available knowledge concerning all the reactants and materials of construction which are actually used in a given process or plant, and display for the plant manager only the relevant information that is needed to maintain safety at the processing plant in question.
EditThe Technical Requirement
The product was required to integrate well with other software being used currently be the company. Storing the data in a desktop database structure such as MSAccess, and generating the output reports into the widely used Excel workbook file format was set as desirable aspect of the solution.
Althought Microsoft MS Access MDB files are somewhat liable to data-corruption issues, and lack robustness, the client thought that the ease of if necessary being able to access the underlying data by non-skilled office users with out any mediation by another program was too attractive an option and outweighed the consequent requirement to regularly backup MDB files and the risk of data loss and theft.
In adition the use of Microsoft Excel as an output reporting format based on template files would allow users to customise their own templates so as to easily produce custom formated reports for different purposes and third parties.
Despite all this, it was considered that some kind of minimally acceptable professional interface was needed to make the process of data entry and management a barable task for a typical office staff person.
Although in essense the process of pulling out chemical combinations of a database of all known reactions may seem to be straight forward, to have the database be of real value in the process, it was realised that it was important to be able to "inherit" information from "parents" of multiple differnt kinds. For example:
A chemical may belong to multiple different parent classes, eg. "strong oxidising agents", "Weak acids", "strong alkalis" etc.
When entering data about any given combination of chemicals the system ought to allow users to drop data from the combinations of groups that those chemicals belong to, but only at the user's descretion
When adding chemicals to processes, all permutations and combinations of those chemicals should be generated automatically by inheriting their standard know interactions
However there is a requirement to over-ride the inheritence of combination information to mark within the context of a process that a given reaction is intended
Inside the context of any given process, groups of similar interactions should be tagged with notes which appear as a legend underneath the combination matrix charts
These groups overlap with, but are not completely consistent with the data which is held generically concerning all combinations of industrial chemicals
The solution
The data structure for the system was built using a straight forward Microsoft Access MDB file containing 12 tables to hold the information that relates to each chemical, each generic combination, each chemical in a given process and each combination in a given process.
The output, as was specified in the requirement was generated into Microsoft Excel workbooks, which showed a series of Matrix tables in the standard forms that these come in, for example a cross-tabulation of each process chemical on columns, mapping against that same set of chemicals on rows, and on each intersection about the diagonal a key letter and note number to indicate the nature of the interaction between that pair of chemicals.
The key to the provision of the user interface was to build a Microsoft Windows Forms desktop application using Microsoft "dot net" technology. Although Microsoft Access comes with a user interface development environment built into it this environment has at least 2 downsides:
Use of it requires a Microsoft Access license for each user using the system
The design environment in most respects provides a rather poor experience for users, and an even worse experience for developers
Use of the dot net Windows Forms environment by contrast is close to state of the art in the industry today, for both developer and user. This at least is certainly true when developing office applications that run on current windows operating systems such as Windows XP or the relatively unpopular (as yet) Windows Vista.
The windows interface to manage data entry and control with the MS Access database, and automate the production of reports into Microsoft Excel was built in about 50 hours of developer time. It involves a multiple document interface with a separate for to manage information about each chemical in the system, its membership of groups of chemicals, its interactions with other groups, and other chemicals, and its inclusion into any given product or process for any given client.
EditThe outcomes
Release 1 of the product has just recently moved into use in the production environment.
So far all the feedback obtained regarding ease of use and efficiency of delivery of output matrix charts for a given chemical process has been extremely positive.
For more information, or if you are interesting in obtaining similar or related systems do not hesitate to contact Dorchester Software on 07957 20 35 12, or email: Andrew@Bindon.org