On December 8, 2015 a paper published by a research team from Technische Universität Berlin in Chemie Ingenieur Technik formed a review of common software tools and methods.
The paper recognizes that “Standardization efforts as carried out with IK-CAPE and CAPE-OPEN have proven to be steps in the right direction” for physical property calls. About integration efforts, the authors state that “CAPE-OPEN can be considered as an industry standard for interoperability between process simulation software”. And “Although the interfaces for unit operations and especially physical properties are applied the most, it should be remarked that CAPE-OPEN’s Equation Set Object (ESO) interface has been very popular among researchers working on the development of numerical algorithms. Using the CAPE-OPEN ESO interface, several authors apply their own developed algorithms on gPROMS models.”
CO-LaN is thankful to the authors for these words. It is worth mentioning that, a few years ago, the IK-CAPE thermodynamic server has been made CAPE-OPEN compliant by AixCAPE e.V. So IK-CAPE and CAPE-OPEN were somehow brought together. The recognition that the numerical interface specifications in CAPE-OPEN have been valued by the research community is of interest to CO-LaN when re-visiting the CAPE-OPEN standards in the midst of developing a CAPE-OPEN middleware.