Picture of Michel PONSLogo of AspenWorld2002Within AspenWorld 2002, the conference organized by Aspen Technology from October 26 till October 31, 2002 in Washington D.C., Michel PONS was invited, as Process Simulation Team Manager at ATOFINA, to express views on CAPE-OPEN. These views were presented (PDF, 609 Kbytes) in a Aspen Simulation World User Group (ASWUG) session.

After briefly describing ATOFINA as well as its parent company TOTALFINAELF, including a note on the many different processes, the world-wide operations and a much-spread process engineering organization of the TOTALFINAELF group, Michel PONS mentions that each branch of the TOTALFINAELF group uses a different set of process simulators. Since crossovers in terms of studies happen more and more often between branches, this calls for interoperability between simulation software and CAPE-OPEN brings it to TOTALFINAELF. Michel PONS describes the CAPE-OPEN initiative from its starting point till 2002, together with listing the parties involved in the different phases. Then the scope of CAPE-OPEN is given through a short description of the CAPE-OPEN standard architecture.

The specific advantage brought by CAPE-OPEN to ATOFINA are with thermodynamics and unit operations, while physical property data banks are also expected to play an important role. Michel PONS mentions that CAPE-OPEN has become part of the purchasing policy at TOTALFINAELF, giving an example in the upstream branch with a metering tool. He then goes on by stating what TOTALFINAELF expects from software vendors in terms of CAPE-OPEN implementation.

TOTALFINAELF wants CAPE-OPEN to remain the interoperability standard for process simulation, notwithstanding the recent challenge made against CAPE-OPEN. Performance issues are first of all implementation issues and CAPE-OPEN has already achieved commercial status. CAPE-OPEN brings benefits to end-users, software vendors and academics.

Y02 AspenWorld ATOFINA