Abnormal situation monitoring and management of complex industrial facilities

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This collaborative research and development project is to develop, evaluate, and apply advanced tools for assisting industrial plant operators in their decisions on abnormal situations, and therefore enhance safe plant operations. In operating industrial facilities, it is becoming increasingly important to develop plant operation and management strategies for sustainable Environmental, Health, and Safety (EH&S) performance and corporate social responsibility. Such EH&S targets can also lead to enormous economic benefits since abnormal situations cost billions of dollars annually in industry due to unplanned shutdowns, equipment damages, and operation failures. To ensure satisfactory operation of an industrial plant and to meet desired measures of quality, efficiency and EH&S performance, it is of paramount importance that operators be informed promptly via the alarm systems of any faults and abnormal situations in the plant so that appropriate remedies can be applied. Such an operator decision support system has two main functions, fault detection and identification, and alarm management and monitoring, for which there exist strong needs for practical solutions. Adopting a data driven approach, based on historical process data and alarm logs, this proposal outlines a number of new research areas for advanced tool development for complex industrial systems, ranging from fault detection and diagnosis, alarm flood mining and monitoring, state based alarm configuration and design, to control and alarm performance interplay. The new ressults are planned to be industrially validated and implemented on Suncor and Syncrude facilities. The tools to be developed have the potential for improving safety in operation and therefore reducing the maintenance costs for the participating partners, as well as various Canadian industrial sectors in general.