Modular Procedural Automation Addressing the Post Recession Skills Gap

摘要

Operational knowledge and accompanying skill sets are leaving the workplace due toretirement, and the availability of good operators to run these procedures is diminishing.How to preserve the knowledge of the best operator on his/her best day has become thequestion.The current recession has exacerbated these issues as companies continue to cutworkforces which gives rise to another concern – safety. The cause of some recentindustrial accidents has been partially due to the lack of good procedural-based,emergency shutdown operations or an abnormal situation putting too much pressure onan operator in a crisis. The pressure initiates out-of-sequence procedural operations withdisastrous consequences.Procedural operations have been used in continuous processes over the years but, as withbatch processes before the ISA-88 “batch” standard, they have typically been set up usingstrings of function blocks chained together or by straight line-coded applications. This isinefficient, not standardized and prone to error.Even the engineers who have traditionally designed these “straight line” proceduralapplications are now facing retirement, making future modification of these applicationsdifficult. A standardized approach to their design and implementation needs to bereplicated throughout a site and company.This paper discusses a way solve these issues, by using the ISA-88 principles to addressprocedural operations in industries that are outside traditional batch operations. It wouldhelp with safety, engineering and the retention of operator knowledge as well as with thetraining of new operators.