DCS as a Decision Making Tool
The modern DCS consolidate all field information in different forms and offer several analysis tools. At the same moment the plant operators are faced with all kinds of decisions: Performance related, safety related or just normal day-to-day decisions.
I would like to further analyse how the DCS can further help operators to make their decisions. Can anybody comment on this, pointing to the most common decisions and situations the operators are facing and how the DCS can support them?
Thanks.
DCS as a Decision Making Tool
All regulatory control within a DCS has setpoints whose values are set by operators following guidelines. Some DCS have supervisory control logic that sets these targets depending on measured conditions.
I regularly install higher level supervisory control logic to set multiple targets (during normal operations) to maximize the operating performance as defined by the balance of multiple metrics important to the user. These solutions (tool-sets) can give advisory information to the operators to make better adjustments (including “biases” to correct more primitive supervisory control logic), or can implement them automatically for closed-loop operations optimization (and reversing to advisory when a large disturbance is detected). In these installations managers still have to define factors that represent the business dynamics such as for costs, revenues, demand, etc.
There are three basic technologies to achieve these results: optimization based on first-principle models, sequential empirical optimization, and neural networks.
This is about the ultimate in the utilization / use of control systems.