Chemical process flowsheets contain a wealth of hidden information. By recognizing similarities in process flowsheets, engineers can understand how existing processes were designed and improve the design and operations of new processes. In previous work, we introduced a systematic methodology for comparing two flowsheets. Our present work proposes a novel method based on a multiple sequence alignment to explore general patterns among multiple process flowsheets simultaneously without having to conduct cross pairwise comparisons of a given number of flowsheets. Additionally, we propose a decomposition strategy to identify inner patterns within a single flowsheet. Several case studies demonstrate that the proposed methodology can compare multiple flowsheets simultaneously to determine general patterns and effectively identify patterns from a single flowsheet.

化学工艺流程图包含大量隐藏信息。通过识别工艺流程图中的相似之处，工程师可以了解现有工艺的设计方式并改进新工艺的设计和操作。在之前的工作中，我们介绍了一种比较两个流程图的系统方法。我们目前的工作提出了一种基于多序列比对的新方法，可以同时探索多个工艺流程图之间的一般模式，而无需对给定数量的流程图进行交叉成对比较。此外，我们提出了一种分解策略来识别单个流程图中的内部模式。