ICAPEOPEN Interface
In recent years there has been an international initiative to provide an interface standard for software in the process engineering community. The CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN) has published an open standard which carries out this objective for programs operating in the Microsoft Windows™ environment and which provides a ‘plug and play’ operation between collaborating software. TUV NEL Ltd. have been collaborating in this project and offer an implementation of the ICAPEOPEN standard (v1.0) with the PPDS Thermoserver.
TUV NEL Ltd are associate members of CO-LaN, with specific interest in the Thermo and PPDB activities.
A prototype CO-compliant thermo plug was developed based on the v0.9.0 specification in May 2001 and ratified with the CO Tester. The CO Thermo Spec mapped reasonably well with the structure of the PPDSDUAL interface and this development was completed in less than one month.
This prototype has now been upgraded to v1.0 of the specification and has been released as part of the PPDS for Windows product.
Selecting the PPDS Databank from within PRO/II ICAPE Open interface
PPDS Systembank details from the Aspen Plus 2004 ICAPE Open interface
The PPDS structure is such that it would be possible to provide CO sockets for other specialised thermopackages and databases.
For more information on ICAPEOPEN in gereral visit the CO-LaN website at colan.org.
To find out more about support for the ICAPEOPEN interfaces from within the PPDS Suite of software, please contact us.