Logo of ICheAP series of conferencesPicture of Michel PONSFrom June 8 till June 11, 2003, the 6TH ITALIAN CONFERENCE ON CHEMICAL AND PROCESS ENGINEERING (ICheaP-6) brought around 330 people together, including 73 students in Pisa, Italy. 31 countries were represented with Italian nationals making 42% of the total. Only 8% of the accepted papers were signed by industry. Michel PONS (TOTAL) attended on behalf of CO-LaN.

Four communications referred to CAPE-OPEN. Three provided strong support to CAPE-OPEN.

“Some trends for the future of chemical engineering in a global market context: market demands versus technological offers” by Jean-Claude CHARPENTIER, the current president of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering, during the plenary lecture of the opening session on Monday June 9.

CAPE-OPEN was mentioned at the end of the lecture, on slide 83 out of 89. The issue covered at that point of the lecture was interoperability and progress to be made in CAPE tools.

“Industrial implementations of the CAPE-OPEN standard” by Michel PONS,

This paper lists a number of commercial CAPE-OPEN Process Modelling Environments and Process Modelling Components. It was selected as a lecture in the first session on Process System Engineering chaired by Prof. REKLAITIS from Purdue University. A question on the relevance of CAPE-OPEN for advanced process control was asked by H. ALHAMMADI, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney.

The paper has been selected by the Scientific Committee for publication as a full length paper in AIDIC Conference Series.

Opening unit operations for process engineering software solutions” by Jean-Pierre BELAUD (ENSIACET), Pascal ROUX (IFP) and Xavier JOULIA (ENSIACET),

This paper was selected for a lecture and was programmed also in the first session on Process System Engineering chaired by Prof. REKLAITIS from Purdue University. Unfortunately Pascal ROUX, who was supposed to give the presentation, was not able to attend the conference. Michel PONS created a presentation and delivered it.

“An Object-Oriented Approach to Hybrid CFD/Multizonal Modelling” by F. BEZZO, S. MACCHIETTO and C.C. PANTELIDES,

The authors make a reference to the paper by B. BRAUNSCHWEIG, C.C. PANTELIDES, H.I. BRITT and S. SAMA, Process modelling: the promise of open software architectures”, Chem. Eng. Progr., 96, pp. 65-76 (2000). But CAPE-OPEN is not mentioned by itself in the text, just that “here we consider a solution which exploits the present effort of modelling tools towards open architecture and standardisation…”.

To be noted the CO-LaN leaflet was distributed together with the books of proceedings.