This presentation will show how COCO (http://www.cocosimulator.org/) can currently be used inside an automated environment like Microsoft Excel® to perform flowsheet monitoring. Flowsheet monitoring in this context is defined as being able to iterate over the streams and unit operations in a flowsheet, collect stream and unit operation information, and perform arbitrary thermodynamic calculations if desired.

Next, a number of applications will be discussed that will benefit from flowsheet monitoring.

It will be shown that flowsheet monitoring – to some extent – can be done by inserting specialized CAPE-OPEN unit operations in a flowsheet. It will be shown that this approach has severe drawbacks and computational overhead.

A new CAPE-OPEN interface definition for the purpose of flowsheet monitoring will be suggested and discussed.