Contribuição ao desenvolvimento de ontologias para processos petroquímicos : estudo de caso em uma planta DEA

摘要

In the last decades, the oil, gas and petrochemical industries have registered a series of hugeaccidents. Influenced by this context, companies have felt the necessity of engagingthemselves in processes to protect the external environment, which can be understood as anecological concern. In the particular case of the nuclear industry, sustainable education andtraining, which depend too much on the quality and applicability of the knowledge base, havebeen considered key points on the safely application of this energy source. As a consequence,this research was motivated by the use of the ontology concept as a tool to improve theknowledge management in a refinery, through the representation of a fuel gas sweeteningplant, mixing many pieces of information associated with its normal operation mode. In termsof methodology, this research can be classified as an applied and descriptive research, wheremany pieces of information were analysed, classified and interpreted to create the ontology ofa real plant. The DEA plant modeling was performed according to its process flow diagram,piping and instrumentation diagrams, descriptive documents of its normal operation mode,and the list of all the alarms associated to the instruments, which were complemented by anon-structured interview with a specialist in that plant operation. The ontology was verifiedby comparing its descriptive diagrams with the original plant documents and discussing withother members of the researchers group. All the concepts applied in this research can beexpanded to represent other plants in the same refinery or even in other kind of industry. Anontology can be considered a knowledge base that, because of its formal representationnature, can be applied as one of the elements to develop tools to navigate through the plant,simulate its behavior, diagnose faults, among other possibilities