The fourth European Symposium on Computer-Aided Process
Engineering (ESCAPE'4) was held in Dublin on March 28/30,
1994. This series of conferences, run under the auspices of
the EFChE Working Party on Computer-Aided Chemical
Engineering, has been held annually for more than 25 years
(the first meeting was in Tutzing, Germany in 1968), but one
has only recently settled on using the same name every year.
There were about 150 delegates from ?? countries present at
the ESCAPE'4 symposium which is a bit lower than previous
years. However, there was a good balance between industrial
and academic participants.
Although the CAPE Working Party does cover process control,
the annual symposium has traditionally been oriented towards
steady-state design and simulation. This has changed the last
10 years and at the ESCAPE'4 meeting about 27 of the 61
technical contributions were on topics covered by the Journal
of Process Control including
Scheduling and batch processes: 7
Operator and decision support, startup, safety: 4
Optimizing and control applications: 3
Nonlinear control: 2
Operability and controllability analysis: 5
Sensor location: 1
Dynamic simulation and analysis: 5
It is clear that the "design people" both in industry and in
academia are increasingly becoming aware of the need to
consider control and operation issues also at the design
stage. To do this one needs tools dynamic modelling, tools for
dynamic simulation and linearization and tools for
controllability and operability analysis. Papers on all these
areas were presented at the symposium, and it seems that the
tools now are at a stage where they should be used routinely
by industry. What is still lacking is user-friendly commercial
packages for dynamic simulation which can be used by the
average engineer, but this will probably change soon. In any
case the main bottleneck in the future for applying these
methods will probably be the cost of developing models and
collecting data. A prototype object-oriented modeling tool was
presented by Bernt Nilsson from Lund, Sweden.
This years symposium was organized with only poster
presentations for the technical contributions. However, it
seems that the theme of the symposium is too broad for this to
be successful. There were plenary lectures the first day, but
these were mostly non-technical and probably too general to be
of great interest for the audience, although some good
discussions were generated. The organizers of future ESCAPE
events should probably concentrate on the technical issues as
this is what the delegates want and expect to concentrate on.
In summary, the ESCAPE series provides a good opportunity for
the design and control communities to meet each other, and the
organizers of the ESCAPE'4 event are commended for bringing up
topics within new areas.
Future events in the series include:
ESCAPE'5: June 12-14, 1995, Bled, Slovenia
ESCAPE'6: May 27-29, 1996, Rhodes, Greece
ESCAPE'7 (combined event with PSE'97): Trondheim, Norway
(date not set)
-Sigurd Skogestad