Beyond FORTRAN and Delphi

Capturing legacy corporate knowledge in a usable, maintainable form

gPROMS offers a simple and effective way to liberate important corporate information tied up in legacy software code, and make it available to users across the organisation.

There is a wealth of corporate knowledge in the process industries captured in legacy applications that are developed, maintained and supported in-house, often in programming languages or environments such as FORTRAN and Delphi.

Frequently the knowledge these applications contain is in the hands of individuals, is inaccessible to other applications, and is lost when the developer leaves the company.

Why change?

Programming environments have several significant drawbacks when used for process modelling:

Model development times can be substantial, because of the need to write or incorporate solution algorithms to solve the actual model equations.
The model code is difficult for anyone other than the original developer to understand, creating difficulty in debugging and long-term maintenance.
Models are often written for very specific purposes, and can only be solved in one direction – for example, to generate output values given inputs.
Most models are written for steady-state simulation. Extending them to incorporate dynamics, or allow important tasks such as parameter estimation and optimisation, is a major task.
Significant effort is required to make models accessible to process engineers, who need the models to run within industry-standard flowsheeting tools.
Models do not readily integrate with automation software, MS Office or any of the other standard tools of the modern process manufacturing organisation.
There is little or no version control or any other type of Quality Assurance.

The PSE solution

PSE’s technology-leading gPROMS modelling and solution environment is specifically designed to aid engineers in capturing process physics and chemistry and operating conditions rapidly and efficiently.

In particular, gPROMS removes the need to program solution techniques, the major consumer of time and source of error for modellers.

Delivering legacy FORTAN to the organisation

The diagram below shows some of the many advantages of converting existing programming language’ applications to a modern equation-solver such as gPROMS.

Converting FORTRAN to gPROMS

PSE ModelCare

PSE’s ModelCare service can assist you with conversion of legacy applications. ModelCare is a call-off service, where you can call off whatever time you require, when you need it, from PSE Consultants.

This can involve a few hours assistance with physical properties integration; a day or two to check whether a model is sufficiently general to handle all required operations; PSE’s experience in building and maintaining library models to ensure good use of standards; how to use validated models for optimisation of process design and operation, or any other PSE Consulting service.