How to Do State-Based Control Design: Automating Operating Discipline for Improved Process Safety and Performance

by Tom Nolan

This book guides how to take process safety and plant performance to the next level by designing higher levels of automation through state-based control. State-based control is fundamentally a natural extension of the unit operation concept in manufacturing that creates and captures operating discipline into automation to ensure operational excellence. As an early adopter of State based control, Dow Chemical attributed state-based control to helping them achieve environmental, health, and safety goals and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Applications are expanding exponentially as State-Based Control delivers significant reductions in unplanned events, eighty to ninety percent in alarms and operator actions.The cost is dropping. With the solid design methodology detailed in this book, subsequent leveraged projects in process technologies are commonly completed for about 20 % of the initial cost of a project in a process technology.The book breaks State-Based Control into easy-to-use sections.Understanding State-Based Control is the first section. It gives an overview of State-Based Control, how the designs address stakeholders, and the use of operating discipline to improve process performance through a human automation partnership.The Underlying Principles and Documentation section is helpful in vetting which control systems are best suited for State-Based Control and how tool kits can be created for control systems to meet those objectives based on the important concepts and control system requirements for State-Based Control documented in the book. It also gives guidelines for developing a project or program standards along with sound alarm and procedure automation philosophies. There are some discussions on State-Based Control HMI philosophy requirements and HMI discussion in context throughout the book.The Design Work Process section takes a front-end loading approach and divides it into FEL 1, 2, and 3. Each front-end loading section has a segment for creating a cost estimate. FEL 1 details how to conduct a State-Based Control Assessment of a process. The assessment determines the appropriate level of automation for each plant unit based on business objectives, process risks, and asset utilization data. A degradation analysis is performed to determine the proper response to abnormal situations to manage them properly. FEL 1 establishes the scope for the rest of the project, and the high-level design is taken forward to the FEL 2 Operational Specification development phase. Investments in a higher level of automation are only made as justified by the analysis. With the cost and projected benefits, the team can calculate a return on investment for project justification.The FEL 2 Section describes a Platform Independent Specification Language for State-Based Control. The language design allows knowledgeable process resources like operators and process engineers, who may not have a strong background in control platforms, to specify State-Based Control designs. The operating discipline-based designs can be leveraged over multiple control platforms. This section provides a completed example of a platform-independent Operational Specification as a guideline.FEL 3, along with the cost estimate, discusses creating a tool kit if required for application development.There are additional sections on the operation and continuous improvement lifecycle phases and appendixes on performing alarm rationalization and advanced regulatory control techniques.

Hardcover

Published October 30, 2022

About the author

Tom Nolan reviews mystery fiction forThe Wall Street Journal and has been a contributing editor for California and Los Angeles magazines.