“The Computer Aided Process Engineering European program CAPE-OPEN “Next generation computer aided process engineering open simulation environment,” should be mentioned at this point. CAPE-OPEN is a set of standards that defines interfaces to allow the compatibility and the integration of process modeling software components from diverse pre-processor, solver and post-solver environments simulator sellers, European clients and academic researchers in computing and simulation. It aims to promote the adoption of a standard of communication between simulation systems at any time and length-scale level (property models, unit operations, numerical utilities
for dynamic, static, batch simulations) to simulate processes and allow the customers to integrate the information from any simulation package into another( see CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network-CO-LaN Consortium, www.colan.org). And in the future, for process innovation it is clear that more effective CAPE is required to be competitive in the process industry, especially in expanding and developing interface specification standards to ensure interoperability of CAPE OPEN software components that will sustain growth and competitiveness, especially to evaluate the process sustainability”
Professor CHARPENTIER especially sees the CAPE-OPEN standard as a potential link between process system modeling tools, computational fluid dynamics tools and computational chemistry tools: “it seems that an efficient candidate for successful linking the three package systems is the CAPE-OPEN standard. Information transfer between a process simulator and individual modules can be carried out through software tools for interfacing packages applied in different operating systems.”