The GOLD Project: Case Study from the Fine Chemicals Industry for a Service Oriented Architecture

By Adrian Conlin (Project Manager, School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)

ABSTRACT

The stages involved in the development of a new chemical process are numerous, complex and interlinked typically requiring the collation and exchange of complex sets of documents. This results in an administrative overhead that can increase the time to market for new processes. With increasing competition from overseas, the UK chemicals industry needs to focus on innovation to reduce the time to market, this can be achieved through increased use of parallel working and dynamic processes which allow an increase in the number of concurrent projects. Other areas requiring improvement are communication, collaboration and cooperation between partners involved in a development project. However, traditional approaches to project management in the chemicals industry struggle to cope with these requirements.

This situation has led to the GOLD project, which aims to provide the infrastructural components (middleware) to support the formation and operation of Virtual Organizations. The requirements are taken from the chemicals industry to ensure that the middleware provides sufficient dynamism, avoids disrupting existing methods, systems and processes, whilst increasing the visibility of project information and events despite organizational boundaries. The middleware uses a Service Oriented Architecture approach thus allowing the partners in a virtual organization to flexibly reconfigure the supporting services as required throughout the lifetime of a project to address the changing needs of the project due to changes in the processes and/or partners. Such changes can sometimes be anticipated, however the majority of the changes cannot and therefore the supporting services must be flexible enough to allow dynamic reconfiguration at runtime.

Although GOLD is primarily aimed at the development of new chemical processes, it could result in major savings for existing chemical processes due to the advent of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of CHemicals) which requires the testing of all existing chemicals produced over a certain limit. Perhaps more importantly the legislation requires that the test results be made available to a range of interested parties.

A case study examining the implications of implementing the REACH legislation (SPORT) raised many issues with the implementation of REACH, among which the following two points are of particular interest to GOLD:
• The administrative burdens of hazard data sharing can be higher than the potential cost savings related to testing
• Experience showed that forming consortia (VOs) is not always the most cost-efficient way to share data

The chemical industry produces a wide range of products over a wide range of industries and within a single product type there can be many chemicals, e.g. >4000 flavors and fragrance chemicals. The implications of REACH on this industry alone will be wide reaching.

It is anticipated that by facilitating easy formation of virtual organizations, and by allowing members of these organizations to share information in a secure, auditable manner, that GOLD can reduce the burdens associated with collaborative working, thus leading to reduced costs and greater control of the chemical process development lifecycle.

BIODATA

Adrian Conlin received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Chemical and Process Engineering. He continued his research into inferential measurement approaches based on multivariate statistical and other data-based modelling techniques during a post-doctoral position at Newcastle.

Following his time at the University of Newcastle, Adrian then spent 4 years writing data analysis software for the High Throughput Technology (HTT) company, Avantium. This software, used internally by Avantium's own chemists, as well as by chemists at two of the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies, provided a graphical means of creating and configuring data manipulation and analysis algorithms. The software simplified the problem of reliably applying the same analysis algorithm to multiple data sets, a situation often encountered in the field of HTT, without the need for chemists to learn complex programming skills.

Adrian is currently working as the Project Manager on the GOLD project, which is carrying out fundamental research into the application of Virtual Organisations in the domain of chemical process development. The project aims to produce a working prototype in order to demonstrate the various principles involved.