(263d) Streamlining CAPE-OPEN Interoperability with Promax®

Streamlining
CAPE-OPEN interoperability with ProMax^®

Christopher Skowlund, Mauricio
Lopez, Jorge M. Martinis, Hugh Docherty, Michael Hlavinka

*Bryan
Research & Engineering, Inc. P.O.Box 4747, Bryan, Texas 77805

As
CAPE-OPEN (CO) becomes a de facto standard
for process simulation software interoperability, a recent implementation of
the Thermodynamic and Unit Operation interface specifications in ProMax® has
been tested. The new implementation, which supports version 1.0 and 1.1 of the CO
standard, extends the ability of ProMax^® to consume foreign CO
compliant components in the form of unit operations, and provides users with a seamless
mechanism to host ProMax^® powerful thermodynamics in their environment
of choice for process simulation. In the present work, a case study case is
presented to illustrate the interoperability of ProMax^® simulation
environment with CO unit operations from ProMax^® and various other
vendors. Furthermore, a second case study featuring ProMax^® thermodynamic
models interoperating with COCO simulation environment using a similar unit
operation layout is presented. In both cases, the impact of the CO interface
layer overhead on performance and the strategies to overcome current
limitations in the CO standard for multithreading execution have been addressed.
As a result, a series of recommendations to increase the generality and
flexibility of the CO standard have been proposed.