Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Computers and Chemical Engineering 32 (2008) 2290–2305 A multi-agent system to facilitate component-based process modeling and design A. Yang e,∗ , B. Braunschweig b , E.S. Fraga f , Z. Guessoum c , W. Marquardt e , O. Nadjemi b,c , D. Paen d , D. Pi ˜ nol a , P. Roux b , S. Sama a , M. Serra a , I. Stalker f a Aspen Technology, Barcelona, Spain b IFP Technology, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, Rueil-Malmaison Cedex, France c OASIS Team, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6, Paris, France d R´ ealisation en Syst´ emique Industrielle (RSI), Meylan, France e Lehrstuhl f¨ ur Prozesstechnik, RWTH Aachen University, Germany f Department of Chemical Engineering, University College London, London, UK Received 19 July 2007; received in revised form 29 October 2007; accepted 8 November 2007 Available online 17 November 2007 Abstract Component-based software technology and software interfaces standardization initiatives, such as CAPE–OPEN, have made it possible to model chemical processes and to perform model-based engineering tasks by combining components of process modeling software from different sources, hence providing the potential of exploiting the “best of breed” offered by the CAPE community. In this context, software component libraries, possibly located on a local computer, on the intranet of an organization, or on the Internet, have to be searched to find the most suitable components for a particular engineering task at hand to be integrated into the engineers’ computing environment. This paper proposes to address this issue through a multi-agent software system which facilitates the engineers to find and to integrate software components and aims at reducing the engineers’ effort to the minimum. Within this system, a directory facilitator serves as the “yellow pages” such that an undetermined set of software component libraries located anywhere may be registered with the system. A matchmaker is used to match the specification of a desired software component with the potential candidates in the relevant libraries. The integration of a matching component into the computing environment is handled by an integration manager. A prototype of such a system, called COGents, has been developed employing an existing multi-agent platform. The ontology OntoCAPE defines the chemical engineering and modeling concepts required for specifying desired software components and for characterizing existing ones. OntoCAPE also provides a shared semantic basis for communication between the software agents. Details of the implementation of COGents are presented and the re-usability of the parts of the COGents system is discussed. Three successful demonstrative applications of COGents are reported, each dealing with different types of tasks, specifically flowsheeting, detailed modeling and process design. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multi-agent system; Process modeling; Matchmaking; Ontology; Component-based software 1. Introduction Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE) develops and applies computer-based methods and tools to solve chemical process engineering problems. CAPE includes a wide and grow- ∗ Corresponding author. Current address: Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences (J2), University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK. Tel.: +44 1483 686577; fax: +44 1483 686581. E-mail address: a.yang@surrey.ac.uk (A. Yang). ing range of applications, from simple searches for chemical compounds in databases to the real-time solution of complex plant-wide optimization problems. As a consequence, the CAPE community has developed numerous software tools, from small application modules to large, complex modeling environments. Users choose the tools they need to fulfil the requirements of their particular engineering tasks. Faced with the rapid growth in the number of CAPE tools, the CAPE community has recognized the importance of soft- ware interoperability, leading to the CAPE–OPEN initiative (Braunschweig, Pantelides, Britt, & Sama, 2000). CAPE–OPEN 0098-1354/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compchemeng.2007.11.005