ICARUS program

Costing and economic evaluation programs also form part of some of the commercial process design packages such as the ICARUS program which is available from Aspen Tech, see Chapter 4, Table 4.1. 

The ICARUS software uses a combination of mathematical models and expert systems to develop cost estimates. Costs are based on the materials and labor required (following the practice used for detailed estimates) rather than installation factors. If design parameters are not specified by the user, then they are calculated or set to default values by the program. The user should always review the design details carefully to make sure that the default values make sense for the application. If any values are not acceptable, they can be manually adjusted and a more realistic estimate can be generated. 

A detailed description of how to run the ICARUS software is beyond the scope of this book and is unnecessary, as the program is extensively documented (AspenTech 2002a, 2002b). Some of the common issues that arise in using the software are discussed next. These or similar problems are also faced when using other cost-estimating programs. 

To achieve this SRS utilizes the special purpose programming language, ICARUS (Interpreter of Commands and Recursive Syntax), which is used both for the meta definition of biological resources and the syntactic description of the data in the resources. The SRS core includes programs which use ICARUS meta definitions and syntactic descriptions to index and retrieve information from resources. In the case of applications, the meta definition includes information on how to run the programs as well as the meta description of the syntax and structure of the output. 

For each library a syntax description of the data must be supplied. This syntax description must describe the data in the database and takes the form of a set of rules, also called a grammar. This list of rules is written in the SRS programming language ICARUS. The rules in this case provide the syntax part of the ICARUS language (the other part being Meta Definition) and are called productions. Productions are used to extract pieces of text from a database entry, tokens which are written to token tables. It is the data which is in these token tables that is indexed and used when querying the database, or extracting parts of the database for display. 

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the use of the Aspen Icarus Process Evaluator (IPE) in the Aspen Engineering Suite and an economics spreadsheet to calculate profitability measures. As described in the previous chapter. Aspen IPE can be used in connection with a simulation program, such as ASPEN PLUS, CHEMCAD, HYSYS.Plant, or PRO/II, and it can be used independently. 

Archlvei Ci Program Files AspenTech Aspen Icarus ll.l Data Archives lPE... 

Archive C Program Files AspenTech Aspen Icarus 11. l Data Archives IPE... 

When a new project is created within Aspen IPE, a folder having the project name (e.g., DECS) is created in the Program Files Aspen Tech Aspen Icarus 11.1 Data Archive IPE folder. As work with Aspen IPE proceeds, various files are created and stored in this project folder for example, the DECS.ccp file, which contains the Capital Estimate Report for the depropanizer. 

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