MetaHeuristics LLC was established back in 1998 by Prof. BANERJEE. Dr. Banerjee is now a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the newly-formed CUNY Energy Institute, headquartered at City College, City University of New York (CUNY). Until March 2008, Professor Banerjee was at UC Santa Barbara, where he had been since 1980 and has served as Chairman of the department. Previously, he held appointments at UC Berkeley, McMaster University (Canada), and Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) —ultimately serving as AECL’s Acting Director of Applied Science. Professor Banerjee helped to establish several companies based on research collaborations including Metaheuristics LLC, Mindflash Technologies, and Gas Reaction Technologies Inc. MetaHeuristics LLC developed highly parallelizable software aimed at very large fluid/thermal simulations.

Back in 2007, MetaHeuristics LLC applied for associate membership in the CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network. Vinay DWIVEDI was designated as its representative in CO-LaN. Vinay had attended the CAPE-OPEN training course organized within the AIChE 2006 Annual Meeting held in San Francisco. He also participated to the 3rd CAPE-OPEN US Conference organized as a topical conference within the AIChE 2006 Annual Meeting. At that time the following plans were outlined by MetaHeuristics LLC to CO-LaN:

MetaHeuristics LLC is developing a platform based on CAPE-OPEN into which various simulation components for ITER (the international nuclear fusion project) test blanket modules can be “plugged” and “played”, enabling development of “virtual” TBMs. Such an effort will enable testing of the TBMs since simulations involving TBMs require a hierarchy of electromagnetic, nuclear, thermofluid and thermomechanical codes that must pass information to one another and draw from databases containing information about module materials, properties and geometry.

METAFLOW is a state-of-the-art Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package developed by MetaHeuristics that is based on the next generation lattice Boltzmann algorithms. It can model turbulent, multiphase flows with heat transfer and magnetohydrodynamics. The integration effort involves automation of the information exchange process between METAFLOW, ABAQUS and at later stages ANSYS, neutronics and tritium transport codes. CAPE-OPEN interfaces are being developed for METAFLOW to this end.

Vinay left MetaHeuristics LLC in 2008. Since that time CO-LaN had no significant contact with MetaHeuristics LLC which, in February 2021, is logged as no longer active as a corporate entity.

On February 11, 2021 CO-LaN Management Board decided to cancel the membership of MetaHeuristics LLC in CO-LaN.