US D.O.E. National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), Fluent Inc. and CO-LaN sponsored and organized the 2nd US Annual CAPE-OPEN meeting. The meeting took place at the NETL facilities in Morgantown, WV on May 25-26, 2005. It followed the event hosted last August by the US EPA in Cincinnati. The 2005 meeting gathered 50 participants for two days of presentations and discussions. The agenda covered basic information about CAPE-OPEN and CO-LaN, reports on recent implementation and interoperability successes.
It provided a good opportunity to develop the awareness about CAPE-OPEN in the US even if, among US operating companies, only Air Products sent a representative. It represents a sharp decrease from last year attendance by US operating companies. Akzo Nobel sent a representative from Europe to attend the meeting. Participants outside the CAPE-OPEN practitioners were essentially from US D.O.E., and from companies engaged in projects with US D.O.E. For those interested, presentations given are available from the CO-LaN website. To be noted major software vendors (AspenTech, SimSci-Esscor, Process Systems Enterprise, Honeywell, Fluent, HTRI) attended the meeting and were active with presentations, showing their continued commitment to CAPE-OPEN.
The participation to the 2nd US CAPE-OPEN meeting reflects a widening of the domain covered by CAPE-OPEN technology that has been very much seen as targeted to process simulation for the chemical industries: within a Vision 21 project the power industry has been using CAPE-OPEN to include CFD models in steady-state process models of power plants. A phase II program has recently been awarded that includes in its scope the extension to equation-oriented methodology and dynamic simulations. This extension will also benefit from CAPE-OPEN technology.
In the UK, VPDM (Virtual Plant Demonstration project) is funded by the British government and is also targeted at the power industry: it aims at developing a virtual power plant through modeling, using the interoperability provided by CAPE-OPEN technology in order to use models from various providers.
While CAPE-OPEN was picked up by Vision 21 and VPDM without any push from CO-LaN, showing that CAPE-OPEN is recognized as the interoperability standard for plant modeling software, CO-LaN needs to apply in the months to come a strategy to attract more US based operating companies into the organization.
At the same time, some oil & gas operating companies are requesting CAPE-OPEN compliance from a number of software providers active in that specific market. It shows there also a widening of CAPE-OPEN scope even if actual implementation from these software providers is still in the making.
These are indeed good news for CAPE-OPEN and CO-LaN.
