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New Paradigm for Supporting Life-Cycle Engineering Naka Yuji* Chemical Resources Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan ABSTRACT: Existing engineering strategies have been developed for how to support lean production by considering product quality and safety protection design. Consequently, plant operations become sophisticated. In addition, social requirements such as safety regulations as well as new market demands force plants and/or their operations to be revamped so as to satisfy demands. There are few methodologies to support life-cycle engineering (LCE) as a whole. Therefore, we have proposed a concept to support LCE and relevant engineering environments at PSE-ESCAPE, Trondheim, in 1997 (Lu et al., 1997). This paper describes our engineering scope for supporting Plant Life-Cycle Engineering with safety-conscious production based on relationships of methodology development and the Engineering Activity Model (EAM) and reports some of our results.
’ INTRODUCTION In the last two decades, many engineering fields have enthusiastically built information models to be shared by different businesses. On the contrary, information engineers tend to be concerned about information model structure rather than its degree of applicability. As it takes a long time to consolidate an information model, it is very difficult to validate its applicability for wide engineering targets. We have spent more than 20 years building Engineering Activity Models (EAM) to support LifeCycle Engineering (LCE) of chemical plants. Plant LCE involves all engineering steps including process design, process construction, operation, maintenance, and demolishment, which includes revamping engineering steps. Reviewing the very few data modeling approaches that consider the entire life cycle of chemical processes, Bayer2 has reported that the the Multidimensional Object Oriented Model, MDOOM, developed by our group, has the widest coverage of LCE models. Recently, some works are ongoing in the area of knowledge integration and life cycle engineering modeling. For example, Sugiyama has provided a decision-making framework for chemical processes design that incorporates various aspects such as economic and environmental impacts, health, and safety.3 In this work, the overall design framework was described as a hierarchical IDEF0 activity model. However, this framework has only considered two stages of the process design phase (processes chemistry and conceptual design). Supporting process design through information modeling, Meta modeling and ontology engineering were intensively researched by Marquardt aiming at producing reusable ontologies that can be used as a base when designing the engineering activities for chemical processes.4 Hence, though this work is very important in the standardization of a modeling effort, still it is working in the conceptual design phase and partly in the basic design phase. On the contrary, the EAM is considering those two phases (process design phase and operation phase) while taking maintenance into consideration. For example, the inclusion of the problems arising while the operation phase such as startup, shutdown, and emergency shutdown is very critical for safe plant operation. In the Demand Activated Manufacturing Architecture, DAMA, Project by Sandai National Laboratory, the transaction modeling approach was used to improve the r 2010 American Chemical Society
efficiency of the supply chain.5 In their research, they set up a tobe activity model that explains clearly each process. However, their model considers only the streamline transaction of information between successive players in the supply chain. In addition to transaction type, the concurrent engineering approach is used to stimulate information sharing through designing engineering work for a certain part of the supply chain with all relevant partners. The target of this work is to provide a Technological Information Infrastructure (TII) that can perform EAM with consciousness of risk management as shown in Figure 1. Therefore, all of our research activities start by analyzing and modeling business/engineering processes before the development of the TII. We have developed two types of TIIs for supporting LCE as a base methodology, and recently we have extended the scope to include TII that supports planning and operation of SocioTechnological Systems. The importance of EAM, as a business process model, is explained in “Introduction to Knowledge Integration”6 in detail. In this paper, we are focusing on investigating the applicability of EAM as a support tool for plant LCE.
’ ENGINEERING ACTIVITY MODELS AND WORK FLOW MODELS Our EAM, mentioned below, has a “plant lifecycle engineering” scope composed of process design, operation, and maintenance and represents relationships of engineering activities, information to be exchanged among their activities, and external information from outside such as regulations, company top policies, and some others. As it does not show a procedure to make a solution directly, the EAM can be considered as a static model. The EAM is made based on necessary conditions to make decisions within the entire plant lifecycle. On the other hand, the Work Flow Model (WFM) is a model that deals with a certain Special Issue: Puigjaner Issue Received: June 29, 2010 Accepted: September 28, 2010 Revised: September 27, 2010 Published: November 10, 2010 4907
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Figure 1. Entire research activities.
given job and includes part of an EAM. Hence, the EAM can be considered as a blueprint for making decision processes in business and defines activities and heterogeneous information models from the global viewpoint. If the WFM is defined without any EAM, as is the case for current approaches, which do not take the boundary conditions of a given problem into account, it leads to making localized decisions. EAMs may stimulate a concurrent engineering approach with effective knowledge integration. We have managed several meetings for modeling engineering activities on R&D, process design,7 operation,8 and maintenance9 with many companies, sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science by Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan, since 1985 until now that helped us in building the EAM. Engineering Activity Modeling. When consolidating the EAM for a certain organization or company, it is very important to consider the company’s policy. For example, the policy followed by the Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan, through its safety division, in designing the EAM is based on two principles: (1) EAM is a plan-do-check-act-based model. (2) EAM is for supporting plant life-cycle engineering (plantLCE). There are two directions of applying the Plan-Do-CheckAct procedure (PDCA) in EAM, horizontal and vertical. In the horizontal dimension, the PDCA procedure is applied to find
solutions under given propositions. In the vertical dimension, the PDCA procedure is used to properly promote the work flow with resource assignment considering different states and conditions. Using such navigation of EAM enables us to support executing engineering activities from process design, operation, and planned maintenance that properly support management of “Change”. For example, in the basic and detailed design phases of any chemical plants, the operation and maintenance activities must be considered carefully in addition to the process flow sheet made in the conceptual design. In the current approaches, the implementation of control and interlock systems starts at the end of the process design phase. Furthermore, the DCS is built by using the terminologies of control engineers, which are not unified with those of operation, maintenance, and safety engineers. In the case of a steady state situation, this approach causes few problems in implementation. There are always abnormal situations that force us to modify plant structure and/or operations. Reporting and fixing such abnormal situations are done using the terminologies of operation, maintenance, and safety engineers which make engineering work in the plant as a set of separated islands. Using the EAM approach, the design, operation, and maintenance information is translated in the transition phases to the suitable engineering terminology. This approach leads to lean production capabilities that involve easier management of change in process design and operation. Also, this 4908
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Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research approach allows the overall safety check for the whole plant rather than the cross-checking approach. This is achieved through building the safety check system during the design stage by the appropriate inclusion of the safety guidelines. A modified template of the engineering activity model with the PDCA procedure incorporated, in IDEF0, is shown in Figure 2. The original template was provided by PIEBASE, which works as an umbrella organization to disseminate ISO 10303 to process industries. Such a kind of hierarchical management enables tracing the root of the problem to the unit process instance level. This helps in solving many problems from integrated an engineering viewpoint rather than solutions from a single viewpoint, resulting from the lack of appropriate information flow modeling. In IDEF0, all arrows mean information; activities are represented as “verbs” in the box; arrows from the top are controls, such as regulations and company’s policy and so on, which are not influenced by the actions in the activity; arrows from the left side are input information; and those from the bottom are mechanisms, such as methods and personnel. Arrows that go out from the box are output information required by other activities. The terms of the output information of one activity are defined by other activities which use this output information.7,9,10 Engineering activities start in several ways depending on the license base or own process base. In this work, the engineering scope of EAM covers the range from basic process design to maintenance through construction and operation. However, the proposed engineering activity model is not a complete LCEbased EAM, though it can support most of the engineering works related to operation and maintenance. The basic and detailed process designs provide design rationale for operation and maintenance. Our engineering scope that corresponds to operational design, in the process design stage, after carrying out the conceptual process design strategy, is shown in Figure 3. This work was submitted to the Kobe meeting of AP221, AP227 of ISO 10303 (Step) by Y. Naka and R. Batres. The proposed EAM is composed of process design, operation, and maintenance activities. Engineers from chemical, petrochemical, oil refinery, engineering companies, universities, and governmental institutes have collaborated for the last two decades to realize this EAM. Nowadays, we have started unifying
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all EAMs; however, it is difficult to explain them here because of a limited number of pages. Functionality of Engineering Activity Models. In general, EAMs can be applied in performing the following tasks: (1) Engineering management tasks (in general, companies provide their own engineering standards and work flow standards). (2) Consolidation of design and operation rationale and related methodologies. (3) Information modeling. The term (1) is investigated based on business process modeling, aiming at clarifying the current state of the EAM, which can be considered as a kind of business process model. EAM is used for making this term more logical from the viewpoint of life-cycle engineering by setting up, concurrently, the required WFM and their initial conditions. This model is necessary to establish a strategic business process. Recently, several companies have tried to build an EAM and use it for redesigning their internal engineering standards.11 However, in general, most of the existing EAMs do not involve the scope of life-cycle engineering. It is important to note that if we establish much a higher engineering framework we have to provide an EAM at a higher level, which involves LCE clearly. Figure 4 shows the workflow which was carried out in the required management of change in the operation stage.12 We validated
Figure 3. Operational design strategies.
Figure 2. Template of EAM. 4909
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Figure 4. Workflow to carry out “change application” submitted by the operation stage.
our EAM in terms of communication between operation and maintenance using more than 100 cases provided by companies. The term (2) means that in consolidating the EAM we recognized that some of the engineering strategies are missing. For example, the framework of risk management should be provided from the viewpoint of Plant-LCE. That helps in considering the abnormal operations and maintenance works that are composed of several groups of subwork, respectively, which are in turn involved in Plant-LCE. Moreover, there are few engineering frameworks for operation design and execution, as shown in Figure 3,13 especially operation design in abnormal situations, which is deeply related to the policy of independent protection system. It is important to understand its design rationale properly.14 As mentioned above, the thinking process of engineering activities is represented in EAM. We recognize that many problems in operation are caused by the following reasons: The relationship between operation rationale and plant structure is not clear. It means that the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is not easy to understand. It is necessary to design the entire operation so that the plant can be stopped safely if any abnormal situation happens. As mentioned above, the operations in most chemical processes have been designed for normal situations. Then, while running, abnormal operations and emergency situations happen, and then corrections are made and corresponding operations and facilities are added to the design. This engineering procedure is popular in the
current paradigm, where operation designers assume different operational cases which do not, completely, satisfy the operators’ requirements and experience. They are always following the process state as well as the plant state. The process state means what is currently happening in a process such as temperature, pressure, etc., while plant state means how the plant is operated including valves status of open/close, switching pumps on/off, etc. It means both states are mainly observed in the operation stage. Hence, it is necessary to rewrite operations from the operators’ viewpoint. To solve these issues, we have developed PROSEG (Process Operational Sequence Graph)15 and CGU (Controlled Group Unit).16 With those two concepts, the reusability of the plant structures information models and plant operations can be realized because they, strongly, take into account the relationship between specific operational design topology and its subsets of operations, i.e., CGU. For example, CGU is defined as a part of the process surrounded by control valves that can be operated relatively independently from the rest of the plant with the ability to include the stationary state. It has function to control inventory in CGU and isolate a part of a plant from another inventory control of hold-ups. There are, also, at least three viewpoints in building information models: (1) Information model for exchanging data among limited engineering activities. (2) Cascade information model from design to operation for proceeding production as early as possible. 4910
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Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (3) Information model for supporting LCE. The first model is the most old-fashioned model and supports little reusability. The reusability of the information model means that when carrying engineering work out engineers can easily and quickly find the proper information and use some of this information. The second model is provided for seamless communication between adjacent engineering works. It seems to be a kind of protocol model which is used in supply chain management. The final one is the information model for supporting LCE that is an ultimate model that can be used with minimum effort to EAM even if the EAM is changed. Many information models have been developed based on the available data (Approaches (1) and (2)) and overlook the need for future visions and how models may deal with them. Therefore, such models are influenced, greatly, by changing specifications of the information model as well as customers’ requirements. To overcome such limitations, there are varieties of information models (Approach (3)) which support multidimensional aspects to a simple aspect. For example, we have developed MDOOM (Multidimensional ObjectOriented Model)1/MDF (MultiDimensional Formalism).17 It is worthy to note that the specifications of information models are deeply dependent on the scope of its use in EAM. The importance of considering entire engineering activities for plant life cycle, in EAM, is the flexibility in dealing with real problems and achieving solutions for them rather than dealing with symptoms. Furthermore, with EAM, we can design two types of engineering approaches: a concurrent engineering approach and a conventional or cascade engineering approach. The former is, maybe, attractive in the case where a part of the EAM has loop(s) composed of engineering activities based on a cassette-type information model rather than its cascade type. The cascade-type information is preferable for modeling cascade engineering activities.
’ EAM-BASED ENGINEERING SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT When supporting life-cycle engineering, one of the important things to consider is the process design rationale representation.
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Most process engineers intensively represent how to define process behaviors in a target process area. In general, existing process simulators have their own unit library that is composed of functional models based on behavioral models. The exchanging scheme of unit models and other physical property data has been developed as CAPE-Open by the CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network.18 However, there are no such means to exchange operational data although a template to represent operational data like ISA S88 has been standardized. For example, although there are close relationships between operations and plant topology, the means to represent their relationships are poor. At least, chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants produce proper materials by operating a process plant. The operations and plant models are important as well as process behavior models. Operation Design—To Support Entire Operations. The EAM-based engineering support environment can be applied to design operations for batch processes as well as continuous processes. Figure 3 shows all operational design modes that should be supported. An operational procedure is represented based on the ISA S88 style and modified to be able to design for continuous processes. After giving core operating procedures, OpeNavi starts a detailed operational design, using P&ID. An example of operation design processes created by OpeNavi and PlantNavi is shown by the snapshot as Figure 5. This environment can be used for designing a procedure qualitatively and corresponds to execution of a water test. As shown in Figure 6, PlantNavi has several searching functions of the process design state, facilities, connectivity, etc. The concepts of PROSEG and CGU have been developed for a start-up procedure design and inventory control scheme, respectively. Both define the relationships between procedure and plant structure. The CGU concept lets us design all of the operation procedures from the viewpoint of an entire plant. Figure 6 shows detailed operation design of batch processes with a master recipe, P&ID, and process behavior model. The control recipe and equipment control can be generated with P&ID and
Figure 5. Design of S/U operation. 4911
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Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research Master Recipe. If necessary, process simulators can be combined easily to design quantitative operations. Safety Protection Design—Unified PHA from Qualitative to Quantitative. We have developed the HAZOP log system,19 which represents the correspondence between propagation paths of individual failure mode and plant structures, precisely. It offers a complete map of cause-effect relations. With the cause-effect relation map, we design protection systems to satisfy the SIL requirements. With the CGU concept, we can design detailed operations for other parts of the plant simultaneously, and also a diagnosis system can be designed based on the map. When executing management of change, we reuse the cause-effect relations which precisely correspond to the previous plant structure. It is easy to recognize the parts of the previous cause-effect relations to be corrected because the cause-effect relations are represented on the basis of their plant structure.20 A
Figure 6. Recipe management.
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snapshot of the HazopNavi and PlantNavi is shown in Figure 7, while Figure 8 shows the design-rationale-based diagnosis system. As HazopNavi gives all of the information necessary for diagnosis support system design, it is easy to design and check the degree of confirmation of the design rationale in real-time. With the diagnosis system, shown in Figure 8, the operators understand, visually, the plant status and the possible causes of the problem that occurred. This is done by: (1) showing the behaviors in plant parts with process fluids using P&ID; (2) if failure happens, the HazopNavi indicates the most possible cause-effect and relevant information; (3) the causeeffect relationship is abstracted; (4) data acquisition; and (5) instructions. Technological Information Infrastructure (TII)—To Support Plant Life-Cycle EAM. The TII shown in Figure 9 supports our engineering strategy of EAM and stimulates our way of thinking rather than giving a solution from a single view. As shown in Figure 4, Techmas (Techno Management Solutions Ltd.) has developed a LCE supporting environment based on information models composed of ISO 15926, ISA S88, and conventional process behaviors. This model is the so-called multidimensional object-oriented model/multidimensional formalism.
’ DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS It is desired that information models for plant structure, operations, control, processes, and material behaviors should be standardized. Therefore, we have developed the Technological Information Infrastructure (TII) with analyzing various characteristics of information as well as EAM. We have developed the Engineering Activity Model for supporting Plant LifeCycle Engineering since around 1990 through an extensive research work sponsored by JSPS. On the basis of the EAM concept, we have extended the process design activity model to operation and maintenance work with many Japanese companies
Figure 7. Example scheme. 4912
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Figure 8. Diagnosis system.
’ AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected].
’ REFERENCES
Figure 9. TII for supporting LCE developed by Techmas.
(oil companies, petrol-chemical companies, chemicals, and etc.), researchers in the universities, and national research institutes. Within the modeling efforts, as the companies provided more than 100 actual engineering work flows, we validated the EAM using such benchmark tests. This validation was very effective in confirming whether the actual work flows of individual projects can be represented or not. Using the EAM, some research groups in Japan have developed several methodologies based on the above-mentioned three scopes. Furthermore, Techmas has implemented such ideas into the Technological Information Infrastructure. The engineering activities have stimulated positive discussions on more logical ways for addressing safety and quality issues and also expanded its application to pharmaceutical manufacturing as well as advanced production system design of hybrid manufacturing systems. One of the challenges ahead for Process Systems Engineering is to address the current move of the pharmaceuticals industry toward more biological-based products. Actually, this change of production methods will necessarily require considering quality-conscious design suitable for biological industry rather than safety-conscious design in the current chemical plants. This, in turn, will need vast changes in the current processing strategies and information modeling as well that is a typical task of EAM. Another challenge could be supporting the recent change toward the hybrid chemical processes composed of some combinations of continuous, batch, and discrete processes.
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(14) P.Asprey, S.; Batres, R.; Fuchino, T.; Naka, Y. Optimal Simulation-Based Operations Planning with Quantitative Safety Constraints. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1999, 38, 2364–2374. (15) Yoneda, M.; Sawai, Y.; Komatsu, H.; Naka, Y. Development and Validation for Chemical Plant Start-Up Supporting System Based on PROSEG. Keisoku Jido Seigyo Gakkai Seigyo Gijutsu Bukai Kenkyukai Shiryo, In Japanese 1998, 21, 12–17. (16) Naka, Y.; Batres, R.; Fuchino, T. Operational design and its benefits in real-time use. In Proc. of the Third International Conference on Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations; Carnahan, B., Pekny, J., Blau, G., Eds.; AIChE, 1998; Vol. 15, pp 397-403. (17) Batres, R.; Naka, Y.; Lu, M. L. A Multidimensional Design Framework and Its Implementation in an Engineering Design Environment. Concurrent Eng. 1999, 7, 43–54. (18) COLAN, CAPE-OPEN, 2010. http://www.colan.org/index-1.html. (19) Kawamura, K.; Naka, Y.; Fuchino, T.; Aoyama, A.; Takagi, N. Hazop support system and its use for operation. In 18th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering; Braunschweig, B., Joulia, X., Eds.; Elsevier: New York, 2008; Vol. 25, pp 1003-1008. (20) Kitajima, T.; Fuchino, T.; Shimada, Y.; Naka, Y.; Yuanjin, L.; Iuchi, K.; Kawamura, K. A New Scheme for Management-of-Change Support Based on HAZOP Log. In 20th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering; Pierucci, S., Ferraris, G. B., Eds.; Elsevier: New York, 2010; Vol. 28, pp 163-168.
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