News archive 2004

November

Mark Matzopoulos changes role

Mark Matzopoulos will leave the position of Managing Director at PSE at the end of this year, and take on responsibility for PSE’s worldwide marketing activities. Costas Pantelides will succeed Mark as MD in the London office. The move reflects a personal ambition of Mark’s, to take "time out" after living for nearly 25 years in the UK and spend time in his home country of South Africa. It also reflects the significantly increased focus that PSE will now put onto marketing activities, to raise the company’s profile within the process industries throughout the world.

Mark says "It is naturally with some regret that I leave the MD position, as I have enjoyed immensely the excitement and challenges of growing PSE from a handful of people to the company it is now. I would like to thank everybody I have worked with for your kind co-operation and your support over the years".

His message to customers is that "the succession of Costas as MD, the close working relationship that I will continue with him and the rest of the PSE management team, and the planned general strengthening of that team, ensure that you will see minimum disruption as a result of this change. PSE will continue to offer you the world's most advanced modelling software and services, and work closely with you in a constructive and committed manner to address the problems that affect your business. On a personal note, I hope to have more – rather than less – interaction with many of you through my marketing activities in the future".

September

ModelEnterprise v2.2 release

PSE is pleased to announce the release of version 2.2 of the ModelEnterprise enterprise optimisation software environment.

Version 2.2 represents a major step forward in usability, robustness and results management capability, with significant new functionality such as:

A new graphical constraints editor. This allows users to interact with the Gantt chart report containing the optimal asset plan in order to capture the experience of manufacturing personnel. The asset plan can be rapidly re-optimised based upon this new information, saving significant time and effort in generating short, medium and long-term plans.
A simple, easy-to-use table format for entering process recipes. This provides faster data entry and substantially improved visibility
The ability to see optimised results connected to each process recipe and / or equipment item. This allows fast and effective analysis of manufacturing performance, and simplifies decision-making.

Enterprise optimisation using ModelEnterprise has two major objectives: to increase the visibility of operations to managers of manufacturing sites (and remove surprises), and to align manufacturing and commercial (economic) objectives.The technology achieves this with two essentially unique capabilities:

Asset modelling capabilities that enable users to capture complexities and constraints of a manufacturing site or network of sites to a high level of detail.
Cost-based optimisation, which applies a unique mathematical approach that determines the optimal trade-offs between, for example, storage and inventory costs, throughput and utilisation, customer satisfaction levels, task reduction, make/buy decisions, etc.

The combination of these capabilities allows organisations such as Dow, Syngenta and Rhodia to maximise the economic potential of their operations and manufacturing assets.

To find out more about ModelEnterprise or arrange for a demonstration or discussion, please email Syed Shah.

June

gPROMS 2.3.1: major enhancements

gPROMS v2.3.1 contains a number of significant enhancements and new features. These include a new diagnostics console, many improvements in general usability, and significant speed and other execution enhancements. Key enhancements are listed below; the Release Notes in the user area of the PSE website contain full details.

Usability: There are a number of improvements in general usability. For example, Project and Case files can now be opened simply by dragging-and-dropping them from a file-browser onto the ModelBuilder project tree; a new tool bar button has been added to open Process Model Libraries with a single mouse click; various buttons and keyboard accelerators have been added, and the forms-based editors for experiments and optimisation entities have been improved.

Execution: Speed of execution has been improved considerably by improving output handling. There is also a new option to run activities at a low priority in order to retain satisfactory interactivity with ModelBuilder and other applications. The stability of MS Excel Foreign Object, Foreign Process and Output Channel has been greatly improved.

Diagnostics: The new diagnostics console provides a major enhancement of the gPROMS diagnostics capabilities. The console provides the user with access to extensive information regarding one or more variables, equations, blocks or units in the current problem.

Equation diagnostics can be provided in simple symbolic form, or in symbolic form annotated with current values of every variable, factor, term etc. The latter is particularly useful for identifying badly scaled equations. Extensive variable and unit information is also available on demand.

New parameters have been added to numeric solvers to help diagnose the causes of unstable solutions, of the type that often leads to a “repeated error test failure” error, and to identify variables that change excessively during each corrector iteration, a likely cause of a “corrector step failure” error.

Runtime executables: It is now possible to use gO:RUN with all types of model-based activity supported by gPROMS – i.e. simulation, optimisation, parameter estimation and experiment design.

Tools and utilities: Tools and utilities have been generally updated and enhanced. For example, it is now possible to import encrypted gPROMS input files; many other aspects of the import and export facilities have been enhanced. Various bug fixes and enhancements have also been made to the search-and-replace tool. New lines in 2- or 3-dimensional graphs now automatically fix sufficient domains so that they can be displayed immediately.

Flowsheeting enhancements: A new dynamic port sizing feature allows a model developer to specify that an array model port is of "dynamic size". When an instance of the model is used to construct a higher-level (composite) model, the port size is determined automatically, based on the number of connections made to the port. This allows users to build completely parameterized models. In addition the handling of connections has been streamlined. PML library models have been revised to take advantage of the new features.

Documentation: The gPROMS ModelBuilder manual and gPROMS Introductory User Guide have been updated. Updated or new documentation is now available for gO:Simulink, gO:MATLAB, gO:RUN and the Process Model Library

Users are urged to take advantage of the new capabilities by downloading the new version from PSE website

April

PSE and Honeywell announce license, development and distribution agreement

Innovative solutions to optimise plants operations

We are pleased to announce a major licensing, development and distribution agreement with Honeywell Process Systems Inc. Under the agreement Honeywell will integrate gPROMS^® within their Experion™ Process Knowledge System (PKS), as part of the system’s Shadow Plant^® advanced application for dynamic plant simulation and a range of other advanced automation applications.

Experion PKS is the first industrial automation system that integrates process, business and asset knowledge within a single, open architecture, improving business performance in the process industries. Integrating gPROMS with the Experion system will result in improved Real-Time Optimisation (RTO), Abnormal Situation Management^®, performance monitoring and operator training to increase overall operational performance.

Honeywell selected gPROMS for its modelling and solution power and open architecture after an evaluation of 5 products in the market. Mark Matzopoulos, Managing Director of PSE, said “Naturally we are delighted to come out on top, and are looking forward to working with Honeywell to take gPROMS further into the automation sphere”. The development fits closely with PSE’s philosophy of providing unified modelling tools across the organisation from laborotory to operating plant, in order to maximise the value from modelling investment.

Honeywell is recognised for successfully delivering advanced process control and operator training applications within its Profit^® Suite and Shadow Plant environment. Incorporating the gPROMS modelling and solution engine within this framework opens the way for more sophisticated applications to deliver information faster and with greater accuracy, allowing plants to run closer than ever to optimal operation. The use of model-based soft sensing will make new information from the heart of the process available to operators, enhancing process understanding and early detection of events. Model-based process and equipment health monitoring applications will likewise provide a range of new information to asset management personnel.

gPROMS is ideally suited for this type of application because it has been developed from the start both as a stand-alone modelling environment and as a highly-efficient modelling and solution engine that can embed seamlessly within other software applications. The gPROMS framework allows easy construction of models of large and complex processes, adapting of models to the current plant operating state, solution of the resulting complex mathematics and application of advanced technologies such as dynamic optimisation to generate optimal operating trajectories. [Press release]

February

PSE expands US operation

PSE welcomes Stephen Sanders to the North American operation as a Senior Consultant. Steve will head PSE’s business and technical development in the bio and pharma application areas and provide US-based technical support.

Picture of Steve Sanders Steve comes to PSE with 30 years of experience in modelling, simulation and software development for all types of chemical and biological systems. Steve is a chemical engineer who over the past 18 years was responsible for the primary design and development of a variety of software products at OLI Systems, Inc. Prior to that, he worked for Monsanto, El Paso Natural Gas, Champlin Petroleum and Procter & Gamble. From June 2001 to July 2003, Steve was the Principal Investigator for the DOE research project, “Development of Novel Design and Process Optimization Tools for Solution Crystallizaton.” He has developed state-of-the-art dynamic and steady-state models of biotreatment and clarification, fermentation, crystallization, membrane separation, electrolyzers, surface adsorption and others, and is a specialist in modeling systems containing aqueous electrolytes.

February

gPROMS version 2.3 release

PSE announce the release of gPROMS version 2.3 for Windows and Linux.

The new version raises mathematical modelling to unprecedented levels of power and usability. Among a host of other features, it introduces a brand-new graphical flowsheeting capability that is seamlessly integrated with gPROMS' equation-based modelling, and a comprehensive dynamic Process Model Library.

To arrange a demonstration, please email our sales team.[press release]