FOCAPO 2003, a conference organised every five years by CACHE and the CAST division of AIChE was used as a platform to disseminate about the new CO-LaN missions. A number of contacts were taken: Dennis HOUSTON (Executive Vice President of ExxonMobil Refining and Supply Company), Marco DURAN (Optimization Group leader at ExxonMobil Corporate Strategic Research), Bhieng TJOA (Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation), Thomas DASZKOWSKI (BAYER Inc, Houston), Jeff SIIROLA (Eastman Chemical), Jim TRAINHAM (DuPont), Irv LUSTIG (ILOG), Dr Narayan VENKATSUBRAMANAYAN (I2).
CAPE-OPEN got a good exposure in plenary sessions with one third-party paper making explicit reference to the standard.
“Rigorous simulation supports accurate refinery decisions”, Jackie FORREST (Hyprotech) and Matt OETTLI (PAS, Inc.), pp. 273-280, Proceedings Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations (FOCAPO 2003), Ignacio GROSSMAN and Conor McDONALD editors, ©2003 Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering Education (CACHE), ISBN-0965589110.
Excerpts from this paper: “The possibilities are much greater than ever before for integrating tools and using a more complex model … to optimize the refinery. This is at least for three reasons: …Integration – Standards in the computing and engineering industry such as OLE, CAPE-OPEN, XML and PDXI make it possible to integrate disparate software applications to optimize the business rather than a niche of the business. Even competitive applications can be integrated.“
Apart from the poster and a full text in the conference proceedings, Michel PONS ran in loop a presentation on CAPE-OPEN and CO-LaN missions during the poster session.