2 Designing Standards for Open Simulation Environments in the Chemical Industries: A Computer‐Supported Use‐Case Approach

Abstract

AbstractUnder the double pressures of global competition and increasing environmental awareness, the importance of high‐performance simulation tools in the process industries (food, chemicals, oil, …) is rapidly growing. However, traditional simulation environments are closed monolithic systems which are extensible only by a small group of market‐leading vendors. The resulting bottlenecks in interoperability, reuse and innovationled to the CAPE‐OPEN project, in which the chemical and oil industries are defining standards for a component‐based approach to process simulation, in order to open up the market to smaller vendors and to facilitate rapid industrial uptake of academic research prototypes. For general systems engineering, the CAPE‐OPEN standardising process has at least two interesting features: (a) it has experimented on a large scale with a distributed use case approach, following a variant of the UML (Unified Modelling Language) approach for modelling, but also linking down to programming standards based on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and COM (Common Object Model); (b) the management of this world‐wide distributed effort has been facilitated by the use of an Internet‐based workspace co‐operation environment, augmented by advanced structuring and analysis methods from software engineering and computational intelligence.