Designing a component store for chemical engineering software solutions

In the Global CAPE (Computer-Aided Process Engineering) Open Project of the G7 Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) programme, the worldwide chemical industries have defined an open standard for chemical engineering simulation software. This opens up a market for simulation components representing the structure and behavior of specialized processing units for small enterprises and research institutions. This paper describes the requirements and design of a Web-based infrastructure, called the CAPE-Open Laboratory Network, through which such components can be certified and then integrated into simulation studies which can be bought or rented as electronic application services. A kernel of this infrastructure is being implemented.