Project description: Real-time applications in process engineering

The Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) is involved in several activities related to the CAPE-OPEN standard. As a member of the Global CAPE-OPEN project, UPC has contributed to the standards in the area of hybrid discrete-continuous unit operations as well as real-time scheduling standards. These efforts have been continued in other projects with the focus on process monitoring, diagnosis, and decision-support systems. All these share the objective to further advance the corresponding standard proposals. Prototypes to demonstrate the usefulness and capabilities of the developed interface definitions have been used on-line on a small mini plant at UPC.

Also, efforts for the development of testing components have been made, e.g. in the area of thermodynamic packages and MINLP solvers. This development is part of the CAPE-OPEN tester maintained by the CO-LaN which helps component developers to ensure the correctness and compliance of their code. In-house packages developed at UPC have been made CAPE-OPEN compliant, e.g. the data reconciliation and parameter estimation package PPDR which is now able to host optimization routines equipped with CAPE-OPEN interfaces.

Benefits achieved