Book of Abstracts European Congress of Chemical Engineering (ECCE-6) Copenhagen, 16-20 September 2007 539 Use of CAPE-OPEN standards in the coordinated optimization of plant production scheduling and supply chain planning J. M. Laínez a , C. Benqlilou a , A. Espuña a , B. Ivanov b , N. Vaklieva b , L. Puigjaner a a Chemical Engineering Deparmet, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), ETSEIB, Avda. Diagonal 647, E-08028, Barcelona, Spain b Institute of Chemical Engineering, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), 1013 Sofia, Bulgaria. 1. Summary Following different specific needs and research programs during last years, a considerable number of simulating packages and components for chemical engineering have been created. However, it has been accounted that these pieces of software are not straightforwardly suitable for integration with other complementary applications, which constitutes a basic need from the perspective of industrial use. Aiming to respond to this need, the CO-LaN (http://www.colan.org ) laboratory was created in order to develop common standards (CAPE OPEN standards) which should allow transparent communication between different applications. On the other hand, although the historical trend in the management of single manufacturing sites has been driven by the integration of aggregate planning and detailed scheduling 1 , current Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems support the decision making process at specific levels and functions, so that the consideration of their co-operative supply chain network (SC) requires a revised perspective and complementary decision making structures. Furthermore, additional SC key considerations (e.g. environment, finances, marketing), are not adequately covered or even disregarded by current approaches. Under such circumstances, CO standards for interfacing software components seem an adequate answer and proper strategy to propose a framework made up of a flexibly envelope of diverse applications to assess SC decisions at different hierarchical levels and functions. The structure proposed in this work is thus in consonance with the trend towards enterprise wide modeling (EWO) which aims to integrate all the functional decisions into a global model driven by an overall key performance measure. Keywords: CAPE-OPEN; supply chain management; decision support systems 2. Extended Abstract The nature of SC planning problem is quite similar to the plant production scheduling problem, this similarity enabling the extension of CO APS standard to the SC planning level. The dissimilarity arises when tactical and strategic decisions are considered. The latter broughts into play a broader aggregated view of the problem.