One of the biggest problems facing the Process Engineering software industry is that of application integration - how to allow applications to be used together. Each application tends to stand alone and depend on its own private way of structuring data. From the engineer’s point of view it would be better if all the applications co-existed within a common environment and information could be moved between them at will. We have approached this problem from the point of view of KBDS, a design support system for chemical plant design. KBDS would benefit from the use of other packages within the context of a design. One tool which attempts to provide a solution to the problem of tool integration is epee. It provides an application-neutral object-oriented view of process engineering data and applications. We have integrated KBDS with epee and extended it to make use : of some of the tools which are available via epee. One of them is cHiPs, a flowsheet synthesis package. We have also integrated ASPEN PLUS(TM) into epee to make it available to KBDS. We discuss the issues related to the integration of tools into KBDS via epee and the requirements to support the use of high level tools in the design process. : of some of the tools which are available via epee. One of them is cHiPs, a flowsheet synthesis package. We have also integrated ASPEN PLUS(TM) into epee to make it available to KBDS. We discuss the issues related to the integration of tools into KBDS via epee and the requirements to support the use of high level tools in the design process.