The CAPE-OPEN Interface Standard consists of a series of specifications to expand the range of application of process simulation technologies.
[1] The project involved participants from a number of companies from the process industries (Bayer, BASF, BP, DuPont, French Institute of Petroleum (IFP), Elf Aquitaine, and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)) together with 15 partners including software vendors (Aspen Technology, Hyprotech Ltd, QuantiSci and SimSci]) and academics (Imperial College London, National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (INPT), and RWTH Aachen University).
This project had a number of key elements including: Operating companies in the process industries typically make a significant financial investment in commercial simulation technologies.
Often these improved components originate from within the operating company itself and contain significant intellectual property relating to a specific process which is not readily available to the commercial modelling vendors.
The degree of difficulty in developing such interfaces varied significantly depending on how “open” the host modelling environment was and how well documented were the associated communication protocols.
In addition, many operating companies also maintain their own in-house software to allow for the modelling of niche applications not fully addressed by the commercial tools.
The CAPE-OPEN specifications define software interfaces for process simulation environments in terms of both the Microsoft standard COM/DCOM and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).
The Global CAPE-OPEN project ended in 2002 and delivered interface specifications for unit operations (in steady-state) and thermodynamic components.
Currently three main CAPE-OPEN specifications have found wide use within the process industries[5] The development and support of new CAPE-OPEN components has been actively encouraged and supported by CO-LaN[6][7] and attention has focussed on new unit operations, not readily available in commercial simulators[8][9] and the interfacing of proprietary thermodynamic and physical property models to commercial simulation environments while protecting the inherent intellectual property.