SFILES are a text-based notation for chemical process flowsheets. They were originally proposed by d'Anterroches (Process flow sheet generation & design through a group contribution approach) who was inspired by the text-based SMILES notation for molecules. The text-based format has several advantages compared to flowsheet images regarding the storage format, computational accessibility, and eventually for data analysis and processing. However, the original SFILES version cannot describe essential flowsheet configurations unambiguously, such as the distinction between top and bottom products. Neither is it capable of describing the control structure required for the safe and reliable operation of chemical processes. Also, there is no publicly available software for decoding or encoding chemical process topologies to SFILES. We propose the SFILES 2.0 with a complete description of the extended notation and naming conventions. Additionally, we provide open-source software for the automated conversion between flowsheet graphs and SFILES 2.0 strings. This way, we hope to encourage researchers and engineers to publish their flowsheet topologies as SFILES 2.0 strings. The ultimate goal is to set the standards for creating a FAIR database of chemical process flowsheets, which would be of great value for future data analysis and processing.

翻译：SFILES是一种基于文本描述的化工流程图表示方法。该方法最初由d'Anterroches（通过基团贡献法进行工艺流程图生成与设计）提出，其灵感来源于基于文本的分子结构SMILES表达式。与流程图图像相比，基于文本的格式在存储形式、计算可访问性以及最终的数据分析与处理方面具有诸多优势。然而，原始SFILES版本无法明确描述关键的流程图拓扑结构，例如塔顶产品与塔底产品的区分，也无法描述确保化工过程安全可靠运行所需的过程控制结构。此外，目前尚无公开可用的软件支持将化工过程拓扑结构编码或解码为SFILES格式。为此，我们提出了SFILES 2.0，完整定义了扩展后的表示方法与命名规范，并提供了用于流程图与SFILES 2.0字符串自动转换的开源软件。通过这种方式，我们期望鼓励研究人员和工程师以SFILES 2.0字符串的形式发布其流程图拓扑结构。最终目标是建立符合FAIR原则的化工过程流程图数据库规范，为未来的数据分析与处理提供重要价值。