Next generation computer aided process engineering open simulation environment

Informazioni relative al progetto

CAPE-OPEN

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: BRPR960293

Progetto chiuso

Data di avvio 1 Gennaio 1997

Data di completamento 30 Giugno 1999

Finanziato da

• Specific research and technological development programme in the field of industrial and materials technologies, 1994-1998

Costo totale € 0,00

Contributo UE Nessun dato

Coordinato da

Groupement Européen de Recherches Technologiques sur les Hydrocarbures
France

Risultati finali

Next Generation Computer-Aided Process Engineering Open Simulation Environment

Major accomplishments: The first major accomplishment of CAPE-OPEN was to bring the major players in the process simulation business - representative operating companies, market-leading software vendors, and leading research institutes - to the same table, in order to reach agreement on requirements, priorities, conceptual and even technical standard definitions in a relatively short time. There are now initial, agreed specifications for all major areas of process simulation, i.e. unit models, thermodynamics, numerics. The second accomplishment was the development and evaluation of a large set of methods and tools that were a necessary prerequisite to enable this Europe-wide process with acceptable costs. The choice of innovative component oriented interface standards has been a critical success factor, even though its implementation was made difficult by the ongoing competition between OMG's CORBA standard and Microsoft's COM standard. In the end, standards were developed in both COM and CORBA, linked by a more abstract specification based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and a set of jointly agreed use cases. The CAPE-OPEN Demonstrations: The feasibility and industrial potential of the CAPE-OPEN standard is illustrated by two demonstrations, the COM developed by the simulation software vendors Aspentech and AEA Hyprotech to show short-term exploitation potential and the CORBA demo by RWTH Aachen to illustrate a path into the future of heterogeneous simulation environments. The COM demonstration shows exchange of components between the products of two of the market-leading vendors, building on the CAPE-OPEN standards for Unit Models and Thermodynamics. This demonstration, using Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) as a basis, illustrates the commitment of vendors to enable, in the short range, the operating companies to combine the best partial solutions from both vendors without costly workarounds. The CORBA demonstration shows interoperability across a wide range of commercial and research tools on a fully heterogeneous network of different computing platforms and different operating systems, developed independently in several European countries. Specifically, the prototype includes (i)French-developed commercial unit models from IFP, (ii) the English gPROMS numeric system from Imperial College, and (iii) the IK--CAPE thermodynamics package of the German chemical industries. In addition, several new units exploiting this base combination were implemented, including a simple CORBA-based integration workbench from RWTH Aachen and a graph analysis tool from the French Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse. This demonstration impressively demonstrates that CAPE-OPEN has reached its triple goal of helping to open the simulation market for niche vendors of specialised components, to enable new solution combinations to address novel simulation issues in the process industries, and to foster co-operation on process simulation within Europe.