Procedural Automation (Exapilot)

Samsung Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (SPCL), a major Korean petrochemical company, produces 700,000 tons per year of purified terephthalic acid (PTA) at its Daesan plant. PTA, a white powder substance that is produced by oxidizing and refining para-xylene, is a precursor to polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a polyester material that has excellent thermal resistance and wear resistance and is widely used as a substitute for natural cotton fibers and in film packaging, beverage bottles, tire cords, paints, adhesives, and other applications.

ADNOC Gas selected Yokogawa's Exapilot modular procedural automation for safe and efficient operation.
MPA based on the company's expertise is a step toward digitalization plant operation.

INPEX Corporation (INPEX) is Japan's biggest oil and gas development company and is involved in all aspects of this business, from research to exploration, production, and sales. INPEX is engaged in projects all over the world, in a total of 29 countries, including Japan, where it operates a gas production plant near Oyazawa, a town in Niigata prefecture.

• Exapilot was built up as e-SOP system based on the standard operating procedures and the know-how of experienced operators.
• e-SOP system improved the quality and productivity in the performance chemical plant in China.

• Based on a careful review of all operational procedures and operator roles and configured new SOPs in Exapilot.
• As a result, SFC has been able to reduce operator workload, improve product quality, and reduce production losses.

• At the company's Ulsan resin plant, six Exaquantum servers were connected to CENTUM CS 3000 and other vendor's systems.
• KKPC needed to expand its SBC capabilities and improve production efficiency at its plants.

• Exapilot contributes to safety, reduces cost, and retains operational know-how.

• Configuration of complicated procedures in Exapilot leads to operational excellence.
• DENKA wanted to standardize the operation, reduce workload and prevent operator errors.

• Exapilot smoothly starts up and shuts down the world's biggest experimental distillation unit.
• Data visualization is the key, giving operators a complete understanding of what is is going on in the process, in real time.

• Up to 90% of all manual tasks can now be carried out automatically.
• Increasing productivity by means of partially automated start-up and load change procedures.

• Stable regeneration of butane driers and effective start-up of sulfur recovery plant.
• Exapilot contributes to operational consistency and procedure management in large refinery plant.

• Exapilot improves operations and reduces energy use at PTT Khanom Gas Separation Plant #4.
• This is a real solution package and a good tool for the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle to achieve operational excellence in the plant.

In 2008 and 2009, two new deepwater facilities were brought online by Chevron's Gulf of Mexico Business Unit (GOM). Operating procedures were developed by the project teams and maintained on paper. Chevron GOM management and engineers recognized that keeping procedures up to date and consistent execution among operating facilities had a significant impact to platform reliability.

• Exapilot is Effectively Applied to Polypropylene Plant and Optimizes Operation, Cost Savings.
• By using Yokogawa's Exapilot, Safripol were able to eliminate product variations and kept the operations consistent.

• Kaneka Corporation has urgently needed to implement countermeasures that would reduce this facility's energy costs.
• Optimization of control strategy helps BTG plant save energy and operate more efficiently.

• Exapilot was introduced to maximize operational efficiency at an experimental refining facility.
• To prevent operator errors, it was essential to standardize operating procedures.

Located in South Africa, Safripol is a leading plastics manufacturer that utilizes Basell's Spheripol technology to produce 110,000 mt/year of polypropylene (PP) and 160,000 mt/year of high density polyethylene (HDPE). The polypropylene plant has been using Yokogawa control systems for over fifteen years, has kept up with current technology advances and is currently running Centum VP.

Continuous Control Solutions ("CCS") has been providing advanced turbo machinery solutions to global markets since 2000 with a steadfast focus on developing advanced control algorithms implemented in the customer's choice of PLC or DCS hardware platform. CCS Turbo Machinery Control Solutions have been implemented on a variety of hardware platforms including Allen Bradley ControlLogix, Honeywell C300, Siemens S7, ABB AC800M and Emerson DeltaV.

Advanced solutions improve plant safety and product quality while reducing power consumption, emissions, and operator workload.

This paper shows how to improve distillation operations by focusing on procedure automation. It will review the importance of using procedures in distillation operations and highlights the collaboration work underway between Fractionation Research Inc. (FRI) and Yokogawa Corporation to improve procedural operations.

Operational error is the single biggest reason for unscheduled shutdowns in process plants, causing several millions of dollars in damages and losses per year. Combine this with an aging skilled workforce leaving the work place, with inexperienced people to replace them, and there is no doubt that process plants face a challenging problem.

Yokogawa has come a long way in making its message clear to the world of process automation. Last year, the company embarked on a full-scale global marketing campaign to make customers aware of the company's focus on system reliability, security, dependability, and robustness. Dubbed "Vigilance", the campaign created a unified message for the company and greatly helped expand awareness of the Yokogawa brand and corporate philosophy.

The world of process automation is governed by procedures. While we like to refer to the process industries as being largely "continuous", this could not be further from the truth. Process manufacturing is constantly in flux.

Large process industry companies have recently started building plants with world-class safety and profitability to reinforce their competitive edge in the global market. As for plant operations, support functions for improving operators' plant operation skills and for extending operators' maximum capability are required to the DCS so that an operator can expand the area of plant monitoring or operate a plant with higher cost- consciousness.

In 1999, Yokogawa Electric Corporation formed an alliance with Shell Global Solutions International B.V. (SGSI) in Advanced Process Control (APC), and both companies have since jointly developed products. This alliance successfully combined SGSI's experience gained through more than 800 projects in more than 30 years and Yokogawa's great deal of experience with the process control market, and strengthened the scheme to provide the APC technology.

In recent years, safety and profitability have become ever more important in the process industry due to fierce global competition. Greater emphasis is being placed on highly efficient plant operation for reducing the increasing energy bill.

Recently, standardization of procedural automation of manual operations has been promoted mainly by the International Society of Automation (ISA), and the functional requirements necessary for automation are being studied by the ISA106 committee in the US.

For a coal fired power generation plant (hereafter referred to as "BTG facilities," in which "BTG" stands for boiler, steam turbine, and generator) supplying power to a large-scale production plant, the CO₂ emissions from such facilities are a critical issue today.

Remarkable progress in information technology has led to open architecture systems and networking in the manufacturing industry. In such industry, remote monitoring systems based on public communication lines or the Internet, and or collaboration of control, information, and corporate systems based on standardized interfaces such as OLE for Process Control (OPC) are now widely used via networks.

Due to emerging competitors from the rapidly growing countries such as India and China and the global economic downturn triggered by the Lehman shock, many companies in the process industries are struggling to survive the severe global competition.

Elbert van der Bijl (Yokogawa Europe) and Dr. Maurice J. Wilkins (Yokogawa North America) discuss the future of modular procedural automation in the process industries.

July 2011

Process plants are run according to operational procedures. These procedures consist of a set of tasks that are executed in a consistent manner to achieve a specific objective, such as starting up, shutting down or transitioning a unit as part of making a product. 

Process plants require operational procedures in order to produce products. These procedures consist of a set of tasks that are executed in a consistent manner to achieve a specific objective such as starting up or shutting down, or transitioning to a different product. The level of detail, purpose and frequency of use of these procedures varies by process, company and site—but in all cases these procedures should be the basis for plant operations.

ARC believes that by implementing procedural automation, many process plants can minimize variability to help ensure smooth, efficient, and safe state transitions.

Manual operations live on and even thrive in largely automated process plants, and they are often the cause of safety incidents.

By Maurice Wilkins, VP Strategic Technology Marketing Center, Yokogawa Corporation of America
Marcus Tennant, Senior Principal Technology Strategist, Yokogawa Corporation of America

Exaquantum/DTA enables Downtime analysis to be carried out by automatically recording times when plant equipment is not running ('Downtimes') and production figures which are less than the Maximum Sustainable Production Rate ('Rate Losses'). Reasons can then be assigned to these events to add context.  The solution provides statistics including support for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) that are integral to the operational decision making process with a view to minimizing plant loss and maximizing future production.

The solution allows implementation of a continuous plant availability improvement program through increased awareness of Downtime and Rate Loss within the operating process and equipment dynamics.   Exaquantum/DTA can be used to prioritize maintenance by identifying the causes and effects of production loss and reduces manual data entry inaccuracies by automating data collection.

Exaquantum is a comprehensive Plant Information Management System (PIMS) incorporating a data historian for real time and historical data, alarms, and events along with aggregations, role-based views and KPIs, graphical HMI, trends, reports, and integration with different systems.  It provides a cetralized repository for users throughout the plant and is the foundation for most of Yokogawa's production, safety, and alarm optimization solutions and operator effectiveness solutions. Exaquantum can acquire data from all facets of a process and transform that data into easily usable, high-value actionable information that can be made avaialable across the enterprise.

Exapilot is the operation efficiency improvement package.

Chet Mroz of Yokogawa Discusses Critical Automation in the Energy Market @ the 2014 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, FL. Interview conducted by Mark Sen Gupta of ARC Advisory Group.