166 – Monthly conference call

13 DECEMBER 2018

Logo of CO-LaN smallCO-LaN Management Board held today its monthly meeting at 2 pm Central European Time.

Agenda:

  • Apologies for absence
  • Previous Minutes
  • CAPE-OPEN 2019 Annual Meeting
    • Hosting/Timing/Location
  • Evaluation of consultancy service scheme
  • CAPE-OPEN Forum
  • Certification
  • Actions Review
  • AOB

Participants

BASF (represented by Peter MAUER), BP (represented by Mick LEE), Linde Engineering (represented by Oliver KOCH), Shell Global Solutions (represented by Richard BAUR), Michel PONS (Contractor as Chief Technology Officer). Apologies for absence received from Air Liquide,  Bryn STENHOUSE (Contractor) and The Dow Chemical Company.

Decisions

  • The minutes of the November 2018 Management Board meeting were approved.
  • CAPE-OPEN 2019 Annual Meeting: no decision  yet on location. Further options to be considered.
  • Evaluation of Consultancy Service Scheme
    • In 2013 there were 3 consultancy schemes approved. In 2015 there were two schemes (VMG and AspenTech). In 2016 there was just one with Intelligen.
    • Although every organization having received consultancy services has stated satisfaction with the service provided, only ChemSep and Honeywell Process Solutions have reported benefits from the Consultancy Service Scheme. ChemSep reported satisfaction with the CAPE-OPEN wrapper of its physical property server and confirmed it has been successfully used. For Honeywell Process Solutions, the user interface and reliability of the CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation socket have been improved and the facility is used extensively. This work had a positive impact for end-users.
    • An increase of licence sales by any recipient of consultancy services because of CAPE-OPEN has never been reported.
    • Decision: for future recipients of the service, there should be some form of business case prepared beforehand. Also, it is important to get feedback how successful the work is, and the business impact made: the application template should be expanded to clarify the business case behind the request. The applicant should also agree to provide feedback on the level of usage derived from the service. These constraints will be added to the terms and conditions for the service provision.
  • CAPE-OPEN forum
    • MPT has circulated a document regarding the security of the CAPE-OPEN forum and giving proposals on possible ways forward. The meeting discussed the following issues:
      • The forum faces the same security issues as the CO-LaN website for which the Management Board have recently agreed a move to an HTTPS address.
      • The forum is hosted on a server which is currently blacklisted. The blacklisting is not due to problems with the CAPE-OPEN forum itself but to other databases on the same server. The blacklisting impacts the routine usage of the forum by the CAPE-OPEN community and potentially reduces user confidence in the forum’s integrity.
      • The CAPE-OPEN forum is running under an out-dated version of phpBB.
      • The CO-LaN website is hosted by Top Concepts. Costs to move the forum to be also hosted by Top Concepts are high since it involves moving to a more recent version of phpBB . However, with the move, there would be some uncertainty over the resultant forum functionality due to the required version change of the open source forum software phpBB.
      • WordPress, the application running the CO-LaN website, also has a bulletin board application developed in parallel. But there would be no easy way to transfer across the contents of the current CAPE-OPEN forum. All agreed that it is important not to lose the historical communications on the current forum.
      • Option to be considered: base the future forum usage on the WordPress system (CO-LaN website and CAPE-OPEN forum on the same server) but also retain the old forum and make the content available via a search facility from the new forum. Costs for keeping the existing forum frozen would be low. All agreed that MPT should follow up on this option.
  • Certification
    • There is a lot of technical complexity. The work should start with a small solution and improve on this in gradual steps.
    • It has not been decided yet if the self-test suite will start with the CAPE-OPEN Thermo or Unit test procedure. It was generally felt that Thermo will be the easier option.
    • Need to decide if the work starts with a self-test suite (CO-LaN responsibility to check tests) or to set up a clean virtual machine, hosted by CO-LaN, that software venders could use for testing.

Next meeting is scheduled for January 10, 2019.