10th International Symposium on Process Systems Engineering - PSE2009

Rita Maria de Brito Alves, Claudio Augusto Oller do Nascimento and Evaristo
Chalbaud Biscaia Jr. (Editors)
© 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 201

Interfacing IPOPT with Aspen Open Solvers and

CAPE-OPEN
Weifeng Chen, Zhijiang Shao and Jixin Qian
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Institute of Industrial
control,Zhejiang University, Hang Zhou 310027, China

Abstract
CAPE-OPEN (CO) is brought forward as the standard for the next generation of process
system simulation platform. In this work, the IPOPT algorithm and interface developed
by (Lang and Biegler, 2005) is extended. IPOPT is encapsulated and is embedded into
Aspen Plus through Aspen Open Solvers (AOS) Interface. A scaling module based on
starting point is developed for scaling the models from Aspen Plus before optimization.
The validity of AOS compliant IPOPT is tested by solving the economic optimization
problem of depropanizer and debutanizer multi-column system and the reconciliation
problem of large-scale air separation system. Compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO
solvers is extended based on AOS interface through COM technology. In order to
demonstrate validity of the extended compatibility, CO compliant IPOPT is integrated
with Aspen Plus. It is tested by the same examples as AOS compliant IPOPT. Further
analysis is made on effect of model scale on efficiency loss since the introduction of CO.

Keywords: Aspen Open Solvers, CAPE-OPEN, Scaling, Optimization

1. Introduction
Process system simulation and optimization have long been used as means to estimate
the economic benefit and impact for environment of different design options. There
have been many process simulation tools with excellent solvers, abundant unit models,
or precise thermodynamic and physical properties. However, there are still critical
demands for effective interactions among different modules.
CAPE-OPEN (CO) is brought forward as the standard for the next generation of process
system simulation platform. It is conceived to achieve the goals of facilitating process
modeling and design and increasing interoperability among various process simulation
tools. The CO interoperability standard allows interoperation among heterogeneous
Process Modeling Components (PMCs) and Process Modeling Environments (PMEs)
from different software providers, independent of their algorithmic details,
programming languages and operating system (Yang et al, 2007).
Many highly competitive software suppliers and famous research groups are involved in
developing and utilizing CO compliant software, however, most of them focus on the
development of CO compliant unit operations and CO compliant thermodynamic and
physical properties (Ricardo et al, 2008; Testard et al, 2005). CO compliant numeric
solvers, especially optimization solvers, are seldom concerned.
In this paper, the IPOPT algorithm and interface developed by (Lang and Biegler, 2005)
is extended. Section 2 discusses IPOPT for Aspen Plus through Aspen Open Solvers
(AOS) Interface. Section 3 presents compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO solvers based

Corresponding author. E-mail address: zjshao@iipc.zju.edu.cn
202 W. Chen et al.

on AOS Interface through COM technology. Section 4 then presents a number of case
studies that test the validity of AOS compliant IPOPT and the compatibility of Aspen
Plus for CO solvers. A further analysis is made on the effect of model scale on
efficiency loss. Finally, some concluding remarks are given.

2. AOS Compliant IPOPT

This section deals with two issues for embedding IPOPT into Aspen Plus using Aspen
Open Solvers (AOS) (Aspen Technology, 2003). First, a scaling module based on
starting point is developed for scaling the models. And then, IPOPT is encapsulated into
Dynamic Link Library (DLL) and an AOS wrapper for IPOPT is developed.
2.1. Scaling Module
Since the scaled models from Aspen Plus sometimes are not suitable for IPOPT to solve
because of the ill-conditioned matrix. A scaling module based on starting point is
developed for scaling the models again before optimization.
The scaling method is different from (Lid et al, 2008) which scales all the nonzero
values of the Jacobian matrix of constraints. Original and scaled NLP formulations are
­ min f (x) ­min f (x )
°° x °° x
® s.t. c ( x ) = 0 Ÿ ® s.t. c ( x ) = 0 (1)
° x t 0 ° S x x t 0
¯° °¯
where the scaled variable x S x1 x , the scaled objective f (x )=f ( S x x ) , the scaled
constraints c ( x ) S c1c( S x x ) . S x and S c are fixed diagonal scaling matrices. The
proposed scaling procedure is as follows,
1. Scale variables based on the starting point. If the absolute initial value of some
variable is larger than one, it will be scaled. The variable scaling matrix is as follows,
where x0 is the starting point
­° x0 (i ) , if x0 (i ) ! 1
S x (i, i ) ® (2)
°̄1, else
wc j
2. Scale constraints based on the initial Jacobian matrix, is a column vector.
wxi
­ wc j wc j
° S x ( wx ) , if S x ( wx ) !1
Sc ( j , j ) ® i f i f (3)
°1, else
¯
The scaling module exposes an interface (IScalingModelInfo) to supply IPOPT with
all the required information.
2.2. Embedding IPOPT into Aspen Plus
We encapsulate IPOPT into DLL which exposes a class NLPStruct and a function
AOS_IPOPT (NLPStruct* mynlp). NLPStruct is derived and the member methods of
NLPStruct are overridden utilizing IScalingModelInfo interface. AOS_IPOPT is the
entrance of the whole algorithm. PseudoSolver implementing AOSNumericNLPSystem
and AOSNumericNLPSystemFactory interfaces exposes GetFactoryNLPSystem
Interfacing IPOPT with Aspen Open Solvers and CAPE-OPEN 203

method. When loading PseudoSolver, Aspen Plus looks for GetFactoryNLPSystem

method and invokes it to create an instance of CNumericNLPSystemFactory class. For
an AOSNumericNLPESO object in a being solved model, there is a corresponding
CNumericNLPSystem instance allocated by the CNumericNLPSystemFactory instance
in the PseudoSolver. Finally, AOSNumericNLPSystem is invoked and AOS_IPOPT
function is called. IPOPT gets the required information of the model being solved by
calling NLPStruct interface and CNLPStruct gets corresponding information by calling
IScalingModelInfo interface. Interactions between IPOPT and Aspen Plus though AOS
are shown as figure 1.

Fig 1 Component Diagram of Interaction between AOS Compliant IPOPT and Aspen Plus

3. Compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO Solver

Aspen Plus supports the CO Unit Operation and CO Thermodynamics standards.
Unfortunately, so far there is no report that Aspen Plus is compatible with CO solvers.
The compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO solvers is extended based on AOS Interface
through COM technology.
The CO Optimization Interface issued by CO-LaN for MINLPs (CO-LaN, 2003a) is
comprised of ICapeMINLP, ICapeMINLPSolverManager and ICapeMINLPSystem.
One of the first steps for achieving the compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO compliant
NLP solver is to implement the common CAPE-OPEN interfaces, such as Identification
Common Interface (CO-LaN, 2003b), Parameter Common Interface (CO-LaN, 2003c)
and Collection Common Interface (CO-LaN, 2003d). All the CAPE-OPEN components
implement Identification Common Interface to provide their names and descriptions.
Parameter Common Interface includes ICapeParameter, ICapeParameterSpec,
ICapeOptionParameterSpec, ICapeRealParameterSpec, ICapeIntegerParameterSpec and
ICapeBooleanParameterSpec. A CCapeParameterSpec class is created by implementing
all the above referred parameter interfaces except ICapeParameter and it is contained in
CCapeParameter class. The CCapeParameter class inherited from ICapeParameter
represents all the parameters of the NLP solver. In order to facilitate handling
parameters of the NLP solver, a CParameterCollection class is created by implementing
ICapeCollection interface with map template class as a container.
NLP is a special case of MINLP, so it can be completely described by ICapeMINLP.
CCapeNLP exposing ICapeMINLP is created by using IScalingModelInfo to represent
the scaled model. CCapeMINLPSystem inherited from ICapeMINLPSystem connects a
204 W. Chen et al.

selected NLP solver with a special CCapeNLP instance. CCapeMINLPSolverManager

creates a CCapeMINLPSystem instance corresponding to a special CCapeNLP instance.
It also handles the selection and configuration of the parameters of the selected solver.
In order to illustrate the progress of embedding CO solver (in this paper, we utilize CO
IPOPT (Lang and Biegler, 2005) and it can be replaced by other CO solver
immediately) into CO compliant Aspen Plus clearly, the component diagram of
interaction between CO compliant IPOPT and Aspen Plus is given as figure 2. We can
compare it with figure 1 to find out what makes Aspen Plus compatible with CO solver.

Fig 2 Component Diagram of Interaction between CO Compliant IPOPT and Aspen Plus

4. Numerical Experiments
This section deals with two issues. First, we test the validity of AOS compliant IPOPT
by solving the economic optimization problem of depropanizer and debutanizer multi-
column system and the reconciliation problem of large-scale air separation system.
Simultaneously, we demonstrate the validity of the compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO
solver by solving the same examples as AOS compliant IPOPT. Second, the effect of
model scale on efficiency loss of CO compliant IPOPT is evaluated by solving two
variable scale models.
All the numerical experiments are performed on the machine Dell Latitude D520
running Windows XP and with Intel(R) CPU T2300, 1.66GHz and 1.5G RAM memory.
4.1. Validity Test
Case 1 The depropanizer and debutanizer multi-column system is an important part in
the ethylene production. We can refer to (Jiang et al, 2006) for the illustration of the
flow sheet and the formulation of the optimization problem. For this NLP problem,
number of variables is 3889, number of equality constraints is 3887, the degree of
freedom is 2, and the number of nonzero elements of Jacobian in constraints is 76197.
The results for solving this problem with AOS compliant IPOPT and CO compliant
IPOPT respectively are presented in table 1. AOS represents the CPU time for solving
Interfacing IPOPT with Aspen Open Solvers and CAPE-OPEN 205

the problem with AOS compliant IPOPT. CO-InProcess represents the CPU time for
solving the problem with CO compliant IPOPT run in “in process” (in the same process
as Aspen Plus) mode while CO-Local is CO compliant IPOPT run in “out of process” (a
separate process on the same computer as Aspen Plus) mode.
Tab.1 Numeric result of depropanizer and debutanizer multi-column system
objective iteration feasibility AOS (s) CO-InProcess (s) CO-Local (s)
1.961e+1 11 1.95e-7 9.42 16.37 17.97
The problem is solved successfully and all the three runs have the same objective value,
number of iterations and feasibility, we verify the validity of AOS IPOPT and the
compatibility of Aspen Plus for CO IPOPT. Moreover, from table 1, we note that there
is little difference in CPU time for solving this model in “in process” mode and in “out
of process” mode.
Case 2 A large-scale air separation system was constructed which contains 36 units and
68 feed streams. Each stream has 3 components which are oxygen, nitrogen and argon.
The measurement data of the process system reflects the run status of equipments and is
the basis for process simulation and optimization. As the measurement error of data is
inevitable, we need to revise the data before they are used as experiment data.
For this reconciliation model, the number of variable is 7184, the number of equality
constraints is 7168, the degree of freedom is 16, and the number of nonzero elements of
Jacobian of constraints is 40034. The results for solving this model using AOS
compliant IPOPT and CO compliant IPOPT are shown in table 2.
Tab.2 Numeric result of large-scale air separation
objective iteration feasibility AOS (s) CO-InProcess (s) CO-Local (s)
4.005e-2 173 9.44e-7 75.02 188.30 204.64
This model is also solved successfully and all the three runs have the same objective
value, number of iterations and feasibility.
4.2. Efficiency Test
From section 4.1, we see that CPU time of CO wrapping increases much compared with
AOS compliant IPOPT. Interoperability of Aspen Plus is gained at the expense of
efficiency loss. A further test is made on the effect of model scale on efficiency loss.
Two variable scale examples from (Biegler et al, 2000; Schmid, 1994) are tested.
Example 1 Example 2
n n1
min 0.5¦xi2 min ¦( x  x
i i 1 )2
i 1 i 1

x1(xj1 1) 10xj1 0, j 1,..., n 1 x j  2x j 1  3x j 2 1 0, j 1,..., n  2

x0j 0.1 x10 4, xi0 1, i ! 1
The scale of the both examples varies from 5,000 to 200,000 with step 5,000. The
relationship between the model scale and the CPU time cost is illustrated by figure 3.
’no CO’ represents that the model is solved by AOS compliant IPOPT while ’CO’
represents CO compliant IPOPT. ’Extra’ represents the extra overhead because of the
introduction of CO (namely ’CO’ minus ’no CO’). Figure 3 indicates that a nearly linear
relationship holds between extra overhead and model scale. The reason for this
phenomenon is the implementation of the CO interface involving extra memory
allocation and data copy.
206 W. Chen et al.

Fig 3 Relationship between the model scale and the CPU time cost

5. Conclusion
In this paper, we descirbe the development of AOS compliant IPOPT. The compatibility
of Aspen Plus for CO solvers is extended based on AOS Interface through COM
technology. The validity of AOS compliant IPOPT is tested by solving the economic
optimization problem of depropanizer and debutanizer multi-column system and the
reconciliation problem of large-scale air separation system. Moreover, validity of the
extended CO compatibility of Aspen Plus is tested with the same examples as AOS
compliant IPOPT.
IPOPT is embedded into Aspen Plus successfully as a new tool for solving process
optimization problems. Compatibility of Aspen Plus is extended for CO compliant
solver. A nearly linear relationship holds between the efficiency loss and model scale.

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