Open-use and community-based tools for education in process system engineering: industrial applications from decision automation to data analytics

As part of the freeware, open-use and community-based movement on education in the process system engineering discipline, we present the OpenIMPL initiative that is a forum to exchange ideas, learnings, know-how, experiences and data using the free training license of IMPL (Industrial Modeling and Programming Language) for open-use. IMPL is both a structural and semantic language with its concepts, constructs and configurations of the Unit-Operation-Port-State Superstructure (UOPSS) and the terms and details of its Quantity-Logic-Quality Phenomena (QLQP). This forum is primarily intended to discuss problems found in the Batch and Continuous Process Industries when solving design, planning, scheduling, optimization, control, parameter estimation, data reconciliation and simulation examples although interesting and suitable instances found in other industries are also welcome and encouraged. By extensively performing industrial applications around research and development types of initiative, we provide industrial modeling frameworks (IMF) as a jump-start to an industrial project implementation since it can be easily enhanced, extended, customized, modified, etc. to meet the diverse needs of your project and as it evolves over time and use. IMF's also provide graphical user interface prototypes for drawing the flowsheet and typical Gantt charts and trend plots to view the solution of quantity, logic and quality time-profiles. Current developments use Python integrated with open-source Gnome Dia and Matplotlib modules respectively, but other prototypes embedded within Microsoft Excel/VBA for example can be created in a straightforward manner. The primary purpose of the IMF's is to provide a timely, cost-effective, manageable and maintainable deployment of applications to formulate and optimize complex industrial manufacturing systems in either off-line or on-line environments. Using IMPL alone would be somewhat similar (but not as bad) to learning the syntax and semantics of an AML (Algebraic Modeling Language), although in IMPL there is no needs of coding all of the necessary mathematical representations of the problem including the details of digitizing your data into time-points and periods, demarcating past, present and future time-horizons, defining sets, index-sets, compound-sets to traverse the network or topology, calculating independent and dependent parameters to be used as coefficients and bounds and finally creating all of the necessary variables and constraints to model the complex details of logistics (discrete) and quality (nonlinear) industrial optimization problems. Therefore, IMF's and IMPL give to the end-user, in our opinion, a more elegant and structured approach to industrial modeling and solving so that you can capture the benefits of advanced decision-making faster, better and cheaper. Upon agreement to join in the community of the industrial optimization and estimation applications, all model and/or problem data used with the free training license of IMPL must be made available to the OpenIMPL initiative. As such, it is the sole responsibility of the academic, non-commercial and/or home user to ensure that the model and/or problem data can be released and shared publicly.