Logo of AIChE 2020 Spring MeetingA joint paper by BASF SE, BASF Corporation, Inc. and KBR, Inc. was presented at the 2020 AIChE Spring Meeting to be held in Houston, Texas: “Integrating a Proprietary Simulation Tool into a Commercial Process Simulator“.

Dr. Ralf NOTZ from BASF SE is the first in the list of co-authors. Ralf presented at the CAPE-OPEN 2019 Annual Meeting (held in October 2019 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands) on how “CAPE-OPEN interface boosts your engineering workflow“. The paper in Houston is a follow-up to the presentation made in Amsterdam on OASE® Gas Treating, reflecting on BASF experience with developing a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation from one of its in-house process models.

It is unclear yet if this paper is the only one mentioning CAPE-OPEN. AIChE Meetings have included CAPE-OPEN as a subject of Topical Conferences from 2006 till 2010 and more recently CAPE-OPEN related papers have been presented in sessions not specific to CAPE-OPEN like at the AIChE 2018 Annual Meeting.

The AIChE 2020 Spring Meeting in particular discussed the digital transformation arriving in the chemical process industry. This topic is of interest to CO-LaN who has opened up channels of discussion with initiatives like DEXPI and CFIHOS in order to see how CAPE-OPEN fits in Industry 4.0, which is a subset of the fourth industrial revolution. Does CAPE-OPEN needs to be adapted or is already a suitable brick of the digital transformation of the process industries?