During its monthly meeting, CO-LaN Management Board assessed a proposal made by Malcolm WOODMAN for further development of the CAPE-OPEN Tester Suite. The proposal calls for reviewing the feedback received from vendors, reviewing the maintenance and support tickets still open, identifying, documenting and implementing selected tests for CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic Process Modelling Components.

CO-LaN Management Board approved the proposal.

CO-LaN welcomes the feedback received from members such as ChemSep, Linde and ProSim SA. Initial analysis shows that new tickets will need to be opened to tackle the comments made and the issues reported.

Along the development of the Tester Suite, more than 70 tickets have been opened so far by the development team. While quite a few of the tickets have been already resolved, the remaining tickets need to be allocated to the next or future phases of development with an assessment of their priority and time needed to resolve.

There is a need for a proof of concept and understanding of cost of the approach taken for developing and implementing tests for a specific CAPE-OPEN component type. A first task is to outline the tests based on the CAPE-OPEN specification. Next task is to document the tests so that this documentation can serve as basis for coding of the tests and for reference of the tests. A further task is to code the tests. At last, a review of the results of the previous tasks is needed. For example, to verify that the tests have been coded in accordance with the documentation developed, or that all the tests outlined have found their way in the documentation of tests to be performed.

To carry on these tasks, the proposal relies in part on the work done by the Methods & Tools Special Interest Group: a template for documenting tests has been developed and tried out on the Identification Common interface specification.

AmsterCHEM and Céondo GmbH will be contracted to conduct these steps with help from CO-LaN Chief Technology Officer.