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CO-LaN - The CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network

CO-LaN is a non-profit organisation (registered in France) that supports the CAPE-OPEN interface specifications and delivers future developments to these specifications. Information regarding CO-LaN, its members, work programmes and meetings, can be found on the CO-LaN website,.

Origins
CAPE-OPEN and Global CAPE-OPEN were European Union funded projects established in 1995 and 1999 respectively. The objective of the CAPE-OPEN project was to demonstrate the feasibility of a set of specification interfaces to allow plug and play interoperability between modelling environments and third party modelling components. The Global CAPE-OPEN project subsequently delivered products suitable for use by industry. Following the completion of the Global CAPE-OPEM project in 2001, CO-LaN was established to maintain and support the CAPE-OPEN specifications and to continue their development.

Organisation
The technical work of CO-LaN is directed by a management board. The management board comprises members from operating companies who actively utilise the CAPE-OPEN standards to leverage value within their businesses. Income for CO-LaN is generated from full membership annual fees together with paid consultancy work performed by CO-LaN on behalf of third parties. The current full members of the management board include Air Liquide, BASF, DOW Chemical Company, The Linde Group, BP and Shell. Formal roles carried within the management board comprise the CO-LaN President, Secretary and Financial Officer.

Individuals and corporations can also join CO-LaN as an associate member. Associate members of CO-LaN do not participate in the management board, but have full access to the work of CO-LaN and are able to participate in associated work groups (special interest groups) and the annual meeting. The full list of individual and corporate associate members can be found on the CO-LaN website.

Work Programmes
The technical work of CO-LaN is led by the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and delivered via a number of special interest groups made up of full and associate members of CO-LaN. Currently, special interest groups are active in the following areas:
 * Thermodynamics and Physical Properties: Focussed on the development of the CAPE-OPEN thermodynamics standard(s).
 * Unit Operations: Focussed on the development of the CAPE-OPEN Unit Operations standard.
 * Methods and Tools: Focussed on the validation of new interface developments and the provision of software tools to assist the development and testing of new CAPE-OPEN components
 * Interoperability: Focussed on defining and documenting the Use Cases associated with the use of CAPE-OPEN components within a CAPE-OPEN compliant simulation environment.

CO-LaN also provides consultancy services to assist end users of CAPE-OPEN technologies with the application of the CAPE-OPEN specifications. The consultancy services support CAPE-OPEN implementation including software coding, testing and error diagnosis together with formal training courses on the CAPE-OPEN specifications.

Meetings
CO-LaN holds an annual meeting to which all full, and associate members, are invited to attend and present on their work with the CAPE-OPEN specifications. The dates for the annual meeting are published on the CO-LaN website.