(397d) Cape-Open Unit Development with Cape-Open Studio .Net

In an ongoing project having its final goal in the developer productivity, the Molecular Simulation Laboratory (MOSE) found out that object-oriented models and code generation are useful for minimizing infrastructural, repetitive coding in the field of process engineering and particularly in CAPE-OPEN generation code. MOSE started in 2005 the development of a toolkit, the capeopentoolkit.net, a developing tool that hides all the calls to COM API thus simplifying and minimizing the writing of the calculation part for Cape Open Unit operations.

This toolkit, with its wizards and supporting applications is still a traditional software development tool, that expresses CAPE-OPEN items in terms of a programming language.

Because the developer of Cape Open units and modules normally is not a computer expert but a process expert, it would be ?desirable? that she can define a unit operation in terms of her scientific language, not in terms of programming language. Therefore, the calculation part of a unit operation is a ?flow? of equation(s), evaluated based on some input (ports) and some state (properties). Mathematical expressions, ports, flows are the DOMAIN items of a chemical engineering involved in CAPE-OPEN development.

In this paper, we will present the recent development of a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for the definition of CAPE-OPEN Units in a visual form into Visual Studio.NET, based on the original API defined into CAPE-OPEN Toolkit .NET. The paper will also present the details of the recent development of CAPE-OPEN Studio .NET, a DSL designer for the definition of CAPE-OPEN Unit operations in a visual form into Visual Studio NET.

Details on the implementation and examples of use will be presented.