20 th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering – ESCAPE20 S. Pierucci and G. Buzzi Ferraris (Editors) © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Solving CAPE models from Microsoft Office applications Karim Alloula 1 , Jean-Pierre Belaud 1 , Jean-Marc Le Lann 1 1 Laboratoire de Génie Chimique (CNRS UMR 5503), INPT-ENSIACET 4, allée Emile Monso, 31432 Toulouse Cedex 04, France, Karim.Alloula@ensiacet.fr – JeanPierre.Belaud@ensiacet.fr – JeanMarc.LeLann@ensiacet.fr Abstract Even if today problem solving environments may include editing capabilities, CAPE engineers keep on exchanging their simulation models and results through Microsoft Office documents. In order to maintain consistency between data written in textual documents and data handled by calculation systems, we suggest to make Office documents CAPE software frameworks. The eXMSL for Microsoft Office plug-in forwards equations present in documents to a calculation system which solves them. Results are available as equations which can be inserted anywhere in the document. Such an approach seems to be fruitful mainly because it is based on software components, a paradigm now widely spread inside our CAPE community. Keywords: Framework for CAPE, component based software architecture, CAPE- OPEN numerical solvers, computer algebra 1. Introduction The activity of CAPE engineers and researchers consists of defining problems, solving them, and exchanging those problems and their solutions. Today, presentation and exchange tasks mainly use electronic documents. Most of the documents describing the problem to be solved and its given solution are Microsoft Office documents. So, the CAPE engineer or researcher has two parallel activities: 1. Define and solve problems using general-purpose environments, CAPE dedicated products, mathematical libraries or in-house codes; 2. Present these problems and their solutions in Microsoft Office documents. Naturally, these highly complementary tasks take place in distinct working environments: the tools are different and the documents are different. The consequences of such lack of interoperability are well known. First, the end user must have access to and become familiar with two distinct computer environments (each with their own operating systems, applications, file formats…). Second, they have to ensure consistency between the documents handled in those distinct environments during the life cycle of the case study. Those drawbacks having been noticed, part 2 wonders how both editing and simulating tasks could take place in an integrated CAPE software environment. Our proposal is to make Microsoft Office documents active: CAPE models inside them serve as well for documentation as for execution purposes. Part 3 introduces the eXMSL Microsoft Office plug-in, a try to make office documents and CAPE solvers interact through mathematical expressions. Usage of this plug-in is illustrated in part 4, where we show how some thermodynamic model can be edited and solved from a Microsoft Word document. Part 5 concludes this paper, defending the interest of using office documents as the presentation layer for some of our activities.