Hydrocarbon Processing - October 2021 - 11

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the pump achieving enough discharge
head get flagged to a downstream reactor?
Autonomous operations in engineering
surveillance mean cross-asset conversations
in which signals of health and performance
are shared.
As described earlier, the performance
of process and equipment degrades over
the run length of a plant. The adaptation
of performance criteria over that time can
help achieve resilient operations within
the scope of what is possible at any point
in the run. Likewise, asset health and performance
can benefit from better information
on the activity surrounding them,
including ambient temperature, pressure,
gases detected in the area and any known
process safety degradations.
Remote operations. In the scenarios described,
operator actions in the field have
reduced extensively. Within refineries
and petrochemical complexes, operators
should be focused on performance improvement
rather than data collection and
manual analysis. The achievement of control
center locations away from the plant
site is now more possible than ever before.
However, remoteness is also for project
activities within a facility, as well as for
new units, expansions or revamped units.
The changes in infrastructure of control,
safety, and security (including cybersecurity)
can be achieved remotely, with minimal
plant impact, up to point of cut-over.
This is achieved by separating the design
of control, safety and security infrastructure
from physical equipment and using
universal I/O technology that
renders
every control cabinet the same and every
channel able to be configured for any input/output
purpose.
With remote capabilities also comes
the prospect of remote support for control
and safety systems infrastructure.
This can be achieved in a cyber-secure
way, with the control and safety system
assets doing the talking on the state of
their health and performance.
Enabling systems infrastructure. In
industrial process control,
risk assessment
methods identify where critical
faults can occur with a high consequence,
and personnel design and implement
ways to verify that a single failure does
not cause disruption.
Being resilient means failures can occur,
but the system or operation continues
to operate normally, and recovery is
automated. If something fails, a redundant
controller takes over the computing load.
For example, the author's company allows
multiple process controllers to operate
as a distributed mesh-like a data center
of controllers. This approach enables
simpler project engineering because control
strategies no longer need assignment
to a specific physical controller. Instead,
they can be deposited in a community of
controllers that will automatically distribute
control to wherever there is available
compute across process controllers.
This contrasts with traditional redundancy
in which a single fault triggers a
backup failure, and a second fault causes
an outage. With resilience, operation continues
even with multiple faults, running
until the computing is exhausted.
Simultaneously, resilience must be
considered across the entire operation,
ensuring that operations can continue in
the face of equipment failures, power outages
and weather events. An important
lesson from current uncertain times is
that the industry was not fully prepared
for a common-cause issue that affected
humans. Having backup control centers
helps increase automation resilience.
Takeaway. This article has examined how
intelligence, resilience and autonomy can
be achieved across functional domains.
As much as possible, the decision space
or governance domain between functions
should be linked to benefit operations.
There are always new technology developments
targeting more autonomous operations,
and these also play a role in interactions
with operational activities.
The gradual maturing of operations
across multiple domains towards more intelligent,
resilient and ultimately autonomous
operations must remain an industry
imperative.
PHILIPPE MILLETTE is the Global
Refining and Chemicals Market
Manager for Honeywell Process
Solutions. He is responsible for
articulating and communicating
Honeywell's solutions and value in
automation, control, process safety,
security, process and asset surveillance, operational
excellence, work and competency management,
production management and supply chain. Mr. Millette
has more than 39 yr of experience. He began his career
with Dow Chemical and Esso Canada. He earned a Bch
degree in chemical engineering at McGill University in
Montreal. He is a Professional Engineer registered in the
province of Ontario, Canada, and is a member of ISA.
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Hydrocarbon Processing - October 2021

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