Processing, April 2018

Plant Safety C r u n c h i n g data t o i n c r e a s e safety reliability Using big data analytics on process control and safety instrumented system configuration and databases By Dean Whitford Cybertech Automation Inc n ecology the boundaries of habitats are where the action is One can typically observe an increased variety of plants and animals at the interface i e life happens at I the edge In a process control facility there is action at the edges between systems like the distributed control system DCS safety instrumented system SIS and operator interface The action at a system edge can help or harm the facilitys safe operation and reliability i e risk happens at the edge A typical industrial plant will have a safety system a process control system an enterprise resource planning system years of historical operating data a plethora of design and as built drawings and numerous other repositories of plant data Major equipment instrumentation and other assets are usually represented in many of these data repositories rather than just one The more places the same data is held the higher the risk the data will differ rather than match Safety and reliability are maximized when the plant is built in accordance with a well engineered design and the various operating management and documentation systems reflect the true as built state of the plant and are all accurate and synchronized As with all dreams of utopia this perfect synchronicity is rarely achieved Competing business priorities the difficulty of change management in complicated facilities and human factors conspire to break the alignment of design build as built documentation and operating systems The misalignments contribute in varying degrees to inefficiencies decreased safety of operations and decreased operating availability Worst case misalignments between systems or between systems and documentation are root causes of incidents that harm people environment or facilities Due to the frustration of dealing with operational and maintenance issues caused by misalignments an oil refinery hired Cybertech Automation Inc to execute a project to identify high risk misalignments and provide sufficient guidance to each system owner to resolve material issues The project development phase considered one off evaluation methods such as sole purpose spreadsheets and brute force analysis to identify deficiencies but instead recognized an opportunity to build an evergreen solution to audit systems To meet both the project need of issue identification and to enable system alignment validation on an ongoing basis Cybertechs project team created the Process Control and Safety Instrumented System Auditor the Auditor The Auditor accepts native data from plant systems standardizes the data with purpose built C data mining applications and SQL data manipulation and applies tiered SQL views to analyze the data Views are used to ensure that data is not duplicated and to automatically update when the base native data is changed This architecture provides the means to both easily perform repeat checks after each system owner advises they have resolved identified issues and to monitor systems alignment throughout the facilitys life cycle The project faced a number of challenges in meeting the requirements First and typical of almost all 56 Processing APRIL 2018 Figure 1 Auditor database server Graphic courtesy of Cybertech Automation Inc