It is with a great sadness that CO-LaN Management Board learnt that Alain Ricordeau passed away on September 22nd after 8 months of illness. A number of representatives of CO-LaN members may remember having met him in Heidelberg on the occasion of the 4th CAPE-OPEN European Conference.

Alain, in charge of the Flow Performance Project at TOTAL E&P Research and Development, will be remembered by CO-LaN as an active CAPE-OPEN supporter within TOTAL Exploration&Production branch.

He has been heavily involved in the TINA R&D project between IFP and TOTAL: the project delivered a CAPE-OPEN compliant version of INDISS (developed by RSI) which is now been made a commercial product named INDISS Plus. The TINA project also led to the development of CAPE-OPEN compliant PMCs by ProSim SA (specification handler as well as optimizer): the related work was presented in Salt Lake City as well as in Heidelberg by IFP. Through Alain’s support, University of Tulsa approved of moving some of their software products to CAPE-OPEN compliance, namely TUWAX and GLCC (presentations about these achievements were made in the CAPE-OPEN US Conferences held in Salt Lake City and Philadelphia). Alain supported also the development of the FORTRAN UO Wizard that was for example used in Tulsa for TUWAX development as well as donated to CO-LaN.

Recently Alain organized the use at TOTAL of the VB6 Unit Operation Wizard for the development of another PMC within the Flow Performance Project.

A number of CO-LaN members (InfoChem, SPT Group, SINTEF for example) will specifically remember Alain for his continuous support of the use of CAPE-OPEN in software dedicated to the oil&gas market segment.