Peter BANKS, leader of the Interoperability Special Interest Group and Michel PONS (CO-LaN Chief Technology Officer) presented the production release of the CAPE-OPEN Logging and Testing Tool (COLTT) during the CAPE-OPEN 2007 Annual Meeting held in Heidelberg (Germany) on March 8, 2007.
Peter BANKS started by describing the steps involved in the development of a CAPE-OPEN Process Modeling Component (PMC), emphasizing that even using Wizards, such as the ones available for Visual Basic, C++, Pascal Borland for the development of Unit Operations, and after checking, using the Tester Suite, that the CAPE-OPEN interfaces are correctly implemented, the ultimate test, representing the actual usage of the CAPE-OPEN component, lies within a CAPE-OPEN Process Modelling Environment (PME). At that point everything may run smoothly but if not, it is often difficult to figure out what goes wrong. COLTT has been designed to help there by logging the complete flow of information between a CAPE-OPEN PMC and a CAPE-OPEN PME.
The development of COLTT has been conducted in three phases.
The first phase developed the concept, including basic rules such as no code change for the PMC or PME, no interference with the PMC or the PME changing the behavior from what it is without COLTT. A prototype of COLTT was presented at the CAPE-OPEN 2006 Annual Meeting and showed promising results but also some issues.
The second phase of development involved systematic testing of COLTT by SHMA Ltd and CTO over a number of PMCs-PME combinations involving Aspen Plus, Aspen Hysys, PRO/II, gPROMS, INDISS as PMEs and Xist, AixCAPE Toolbox, ChemSep, Aspentech Mixer-Splitter, go:CAPE-OPEN Mixer as Unit Operations as well as MultiFlash, PPDS, Aspen Properties, COMThermo, CPA Property Package from CERE ans Simulis Thermodynamics as thermodynamic servers. During this phase issues found were documented.
The third phase of development was one of problem resolution and led to production release of version 1.0 after SHMA Ltd was able to bring solutions to the issues found in phase 2.
A live demonstration of COLTT was then conducted after a reminder of the current limitations of version 1.0: communication over error handling and parameters is not logged. The demonstration went through explaining the suggested workflow beginning with installing COLTT on the end-user machine, launching the controller in order to select the PMC(s) to log, running the simulation in the PME with the PMCs logged, disabling logging of such PMC(s) and analyzing the log obtained.
Michel PONS ended the demonstration by urging attendees to the CAPE-OPEN 2007 Annual Meeting to make use of COLTT, and to report bugs, as well as successes, in order to progress the tool.