Improving Plant Reliability and Safety through Operations Effectiveness Strategy

摘要

Over the past 25 years, the processing industries have made significant investment leveraging process automation to improve production capacity and product quality. Technologies such as distributed control systems (DCS), multivariable controls and process historians have delivered considerable value to industry and have become essential requirements for competing in today's environment. That is the good news about process automation technology. The bad news is that both manufacturers and automation suppliers have in large overlooked the opportunity to leverage process automation for improving reliability and safety performance at processing plants. While safety instrumented systems (SIS) have become an acceptable best practice for graceful shutdown of a unit during a major upset, there has been little effort in leveraging automation technologies to mitigate and minimize the impact of abnormal situations. This paper provides a unique approach to utilizing existing process automation technologies to create an integrated operating environment that enables an operator to be more effective in running a unit safely and reliably.