Capturing and Exploiting Plant Topology and Process Information as a Basis to Support Engineering and Operational Activities in Process Plants

Publication date
2017
Document type
PhD thesis (dissertation)
Author
Arroyo Esquivel, Esteban
Advisor
Referee
Thornhill, Nina Frances
Granting institution
Helmut-Schmidt-Universität / Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg
Exam date
2017-06-09
Organisational unit
DDC Class
620 Ingenieurwissenschaften
Keyword
Automation
Rohrleitung
Simulation
Abstract
Confronted with the competitive challenges brought by the ongoing digitization of the industrial sector --Industry 4.0, plant owners and contractors in the process industry are called to create and exploit digital plant models enabling the efficient execution and integration of different activities across the entire plant lifecycle. In the case of existing process facilities, an important part of the information required for this task exists already in form of legacy engineering documents, such as scanned diagrams and schematics in elementary digital formats. However, current engineering and enterprise tools cannot fully exploit this source of knowledge due to the non-computer-interpretable nature and heterogeneity of such data sources. As a consequence, process experts and engineers must often retrieve and consolidate information manually when executing daily activities; a practice that is not only error prone but also time-intensive, and costly. In an effort to cope with that problem, this thesis presents a functional methodology for the capture, formalization, integration, and subsequent exploitation of legacy design documents, specifically Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams, and Control Logic Diagrams. Motivated by the concept Automation of Automation, the proposed methodology aims to serve as a basis for the automatic execution of required steps within automation-related plant modernization and operational tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effective applicability of the approach in two use cases of industrial relevance: (a) automatic generation of plant simulation models for the validation of basic control functions during plant modernization projects, and (b) fault propagation analysis for supporting alarm management and fault diagnosis during plant operation.
Version
Not applicable (or unknown)
Access right on openHSU
Open access