Dynamic Simulation needs to become a Natural Feature of the Industrial Operational Landscape

To empower operational teams, workforce, each role must understand the context of the future, as well as current state and history. In the traditional industrial solutions, the worker is provided with tools for understanding history and NOW. This is the same as driving a car by only looking at the dashboard of the car, and rear vision mirror. Can you drive the car without looking out 100 meters or longer into the future the answer is NO, you would miss judging the next corner?

So why do we think we can run plants in this same manner?

The leading companies are defining the operational experience of empowering the different roles in the plant operations with the ability to “understand the future”. This will then empower the user with:

·         Understanding of the NOW situation

·         Understand the History

·         An expectation of the future based on NOW situation

·         Access to Experience

The concept or words used to describe this capability is “What If” capability. The ability to have at the finger tips of the worker the ability to ask “what if” question and the system will provide the best estimate based upon the current state of the process/ plant, and history. This provides maybe a “times 10” in time look forward so that it provides another reference point for the worker to base their decision on.

An example of how the general day to day market has come to accept using simulation models as day to day is in the weather. I do a lot of ocean sailing; today a natural tool I use on the boat is weather simulation. On my Ipad,  I have two applications, which connect to a cloud application that will allow me to select a location, and run a number of weather simulation models, based upon the current condition. There are a few models with different characteristics that I use to 2 to 3 models and compare feedback, combine this with reading the weather maps, and do a “gut validation”. It is this future, plus my experience from the weather map reading plus applying local conditions such as mountains that allows me to gather enough information to make decisions on what to do. This effects safety, comfort etc, there were examples of friends on other boats that just listened to general weather broadcast especially in remote places, and they made decisions based on this, but these forecasts were over 1000s of miles and extremely general, and open for interpretation as they were line item. In the same situation,  I ran the models; play off scenarios “what if” based upon local navigation, mountains, and my boat. On at least 3 occasions,  these friends left and where caught with young families in life threatening situations. This is decidedly different to when I was a teenager sailing the Australian coast, where we only had the weather maps, and a number of peoples opinions, we got caught a couple of times in particularly severe weather especially 5 hours out. Today I am able to use the models to look 7 days into the future for a trend, and greater accuracy at 12 and 24 hours. Today these models are a natural part of my navigation tools, having on board capability to download the results of the model, and then tools to ask questions based upon routes I want to go, easy to interpret graphic experiences to see results. (As seen below the weather is overlayed on the charts and uses colors to show intensity, I can work through time forward 5 days by hour).

It is easy to receive model results even at sea by sending an email of current locations, areas I am interested by a text email and the results come back in a data file that I load into my local system with my boat parameters, navigation charts, and I can now easily see graphically the results layered on the navigation charts and ask questions, because of this simplicity to use I now use this many times a day to make and validate decisions.

So why, not on the plant? No matter the role, it could be maintenance, performance engineer, safety, operations, where decisions are having to be made, and experience varies, the ability to get these reference points is key.

This must use high fidelity simulation models to predict the future, but the capability of adding this to a solution must be small. Traditionally simulation systems have been offline, and large after thoughts, especially outside of the oil and gas industry. “Why cannot we just add this future capability similar to adding alarm or historic capability to a device supervisory control?”. The answer should be yes. This will require smaller foot print simulation, dynamic and libraries of simulation models for different devices/ processes etc. Again in the oil and gas world this has been done for years, and companies such as Exxon and others have built libraries of optimization, and simulation capability. All industries require this no matter the complexity, but to achieve reality it must be easy (a natural act) and rich this library of simulation models must be rich, and easy to apply, plus domain experts must be able to develop these models easily, these could be device / process vendors, domain experts, and companies. With the models naturally able to be applied to the automation/ operational platform as just another function.

Yes, dynamic simulation is one of fastest growing aspects of Industrial Operational Systems, as we design systems we must assume that this capability should be included.