CAPE-OPEN UPDATE, Volume 10

CAPE-OPEN UPDATE is a publication of the CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN), a non-profit consortium for the development of the CAPE-OPEN standard.

Topics covered and issues raised/actions taken are summarized below:

Consultancy Services  A spreadsheet is maintained regarding consultancy projects.  Examples are ChemSep / AspenTech, SolidSim / AspenTech, Cosmologic / AspenTech, and CMU / UPC project (making IPOPT CO-compliant).

New Members  The University Politechnica of Bucharest in Romania (Prof Valentin Plesu is the representative), the University of Valladolid in Spain (Prof Cesar de Prada is the representative), SHMA, SINTEF, NETL and Chemstations were approved as new Associate Members. Richard Baur and Jasper van Baten were approved as Individual Members.  The web site reflects these members.

Dissemination Events

·        PSE User meeting - Michel Pons attended for CO-LaN and presented a communication, together with Ben Keeping from PSE,  on gO:CAPE-OPEN interoperability with Aspen Plus, Aspen Hysys and PRO/II.

·       2nd Annual US CAPE-OPEN meeting at the US National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) - Attendance was well in excess of 50.  Bertrand Braunschweig, Michel Pons, and Kerry Irons attended for the CO-LaN.

·        ICheaP-7 conference - Michel Pons attended for CO-LaN and presented a paper on the tools available to help developers in their migration to CAPE-OPEN.

·        World Congress of Chemical Engineering 2005 – 2 presentations and a poster accepted. 

·        ESCAPE-15 conference - Michel Pons attended for CO-LaN and presented a paper on the CAPE-OPEN Consultancy Scheme.

·        CAST Division (AIChE) Spring Newsletter – An article on CO-LaN has been included in the Spring 2005 edition.

·        European Federation of Chemical Engineering CAPE Working Party - Michel Pons attended for CO-LaN and made a presentation on the impact of CAPE-OPEN on modeling activities.

Website   The content of the old website was transferred to the new one at the end of 2004, and efforts to update the information are ongoing.  Members’ details on the website will continue to be updated.

SIGs (Special Interest Groups)

Unit – A new leader has been identified by the SIG and approved by the Management Board - Marcel Van Maasdam from Shell Global Solutions. Along with numerous conference calls and e-mails, a face to face meeting was held in Amsterdam. Issues include publication of the dynamic extension. A new member from BP, Donald Perreira, has joined the SIG. An extension to the Unit specification has been proposed and brought forward. RSI and Fantoft are working together to achieve interoperability with an IFP steady-state and dynamic pipeline component.

Thermo – Work is concentrating on implementation of v1.1. At present, PPDS have a v1.0 compliant version and SolidSim are still working on v1.1 implementation. Others have requested some sort of cookbook or code examples to facilitate V1.1 implementation. The good cooperation between AspenTech and SolidSim has led to promising results. TUV-NEL has a new release of PPDS which will contain a DLL to make it CO-compliant. Multiflash had been successfully tested with PRO II v7.0 beta. A top priority for 2005 is for version 1.1 to be implemented in PMEs and PMCs.

Interoperability – The SIG has been given the responsibility for keeping the CO Testers up-to-date, together with the CO Logger. Implementation of the Logger will be contracted.  The plan is to develop a specification for a production version and this will be used to request bids for its construction and maintenance.

Internal Administrative Topics

·       The Board approved the granting of a 1 year contract to Michel Pons to be the CO-LaN Chief Technical Officer.

·        NETL – Associate Membership approved and by-laws exceptions noted.

·        Significant effort was invested in planning for the Annual General Meeting in Como, Italy.  This included an emphasis on demonstrations, developing the concept of the Showcase and the Interoperability Workshop which were well-received by CO-LaN members.

·        The board has agreed that increasing investment spending will be a major theme for 2005 along with increasing participation in North America.

·        Management Board succession planning, member recruitment (particularly industrial members), long term funding, and interoperability testing responsiveness were ongoing topics.

·        The Board thanked Celeste Colantonio for her contributions to CO-LaN and wished her every success in the future.  

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