Picture of Peter BANKSWithin the 2nd CAPE-OPEN European Conference, Peter BANKS, as leader of the Interoperability Special Interest Group, gave a report on its activities in 2014 (PDF, 588 Kbytes).

Peter first listed the CO-LaN Members involved in the Interoperability SIG activities which for 2014 were the monitoring of lessons learnt when applying CAPE-OPEN for interoperability purposes and the promotion of testing tools.

Among the lessons learnt, the multiplicity of existing type libraries is an issue and needs to be addressed through a single delivery by CO-LaN. In order to avoid interoperability problems. Next all the mandatory interfaces and all the methods in any given of these mandatory interfaces, should be implemented. It appears also that the specification, describing the interfaces and the behavior expected from a Material Object, should be somewhat tightened in order to avoid misunderstandings leading to interoperability issues. The Interoperability SIG points that runtime logging is necessary while so far only static testing is available through the CAPE-OPEN Tester Suite.

As for the upcoming plans of the Interoperability SIG for 2015, they focus on the development of a CAPE-OPEN logger for dynamic logging of the interoperability between a PMC and a PME.

Peter BANKS ended his presentation by introducing the three presentations having relevance to the activities of the Interoperability Special Interest Group: the presentation by Aspentech on the CAPE-OPEN Logger, the presentation by ChemSep on their CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation modelling rate-based distillation and the presentation by HTRI on how their software may be used in various process simulators.