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Context-Sensitive Documentation in Industrial Process Plants

 
Barrie   Reynolds
  Applications Consultant - Industrial Automation and Control Division
  Honeywell Control Systems Ltd.
Lovelace Road
Southern Industrial Estate
Bracknell   Berkshire  England  RG12 8WD
Phone: 01344 65 6661
Fax: 01344 65 6554
Email: barrie.reynolds@uk.honeywell.com
 
Biographical notice:
 
Barrie Reynolds
 
Barrie Reynolds has thirty years technical and project management experience with Honeywell in microprocessor-based process control systems development. He was recently Programme Manager for a joint industrial/ academic project to develop electronic decision support tools for enhancing operator response to safety-critical situations, and served as co-chairman of the BSI committee responsible for consolidating all UK comment on the emerging IEC 61508 standard on Functional Safety of safety-related control systems. Barrie also leads case-study and tutorial sessions on reliability for the PACT MSc. course at Sheffield University.
 
Engineering experience with Honeywell has included management of product development and application activities, and control system market requirements definition. As Applications Consultant he has specific responsibility for reliability analysis of process control and safety-critical systems, and for liaison with process sector standards activities and industrial. trade associations.
 
ABSTRACT:
 
The documentation required by an operations team in an industrial processing plant is dependent not only on the physical configuration of the plant, but also on the current state of the process, including real-time data on temperatures, pressures, rates of flow etc. Combining real-time data, structured text, and user choices to determine what information is displayed and how it is displayed, will enable processing plants to operate more efficiently, reliably and safely. The paper describes a vision of a dynamic interaction between processing plant, human operator and documentation that is achievable in principle with today's technology.
 
 

Purpose
 
This paper is part of an effort to define the documentation requirements of the process industries for those involved in considering the integration of SGML with STEP, with particular reference to PISTEP [STEP for the Process Industries]. It is intended to promote discussion and contribute to the understanding of the broad context within which a standard method of referencing and linking to documentation could be of significant benefit to process plant operations.
 
As such, the paper presents a view of the current state of the art of several aspects of documentation in the process industries, and a vision of a better integrated future, without attempting to define or constrain the solutions. That vision is one of improved decision support for operations staff, particularly with reference to safety and the management of abnormal situations.
 
 

The Process Control Operational Environment
 
The operational environment with respect to documentation has many of the characteristics of an engineering development project, overlaid by interaction with real-time data, historical data, and report-based information related to the state of the plant. It is that overlay which is of primary interest in this paper, since the documentation of the development phase is similar in many respects to other STEP application areas.
 
Industrial process plants bring an added dimension to information management, in that they are frequently in a state of controlled transition, are subject to almost continuous maintenance activity, and the operating companies have a constant drive to improve both production performance and safety by learning from previous operational history. These are key factors for the process plant operations management, for whom a plant shut-down can cost in the order of $400,000 per day in lost revenue, and a 1% improvement in throughput can yield $1.5 Million per year.
 
Effective improvement in decision support for operations teams is a wide-ranging subject, and cannot be solved only by addressing the areas of information-sharing and learning from previous incidents, but those are key parts of the solution. Intelligent advice to operators relies on correct assessment of the state of the process plant, and a combination of predictive modelling, previous historical experience, and fast access to relevant sections in complex documentation. Our ability to deliver the benefits is constrained by the lack of structure within operational documentation and historical records, and we are starting to assess the extent to which SMGL and XML could contribute to the solution.
 
The move to electronic presentation of documents for operations staff is starting to take place, and a presumption is made in this paper that this trend will continue and accelerate.
 
 

Documentation Requirements
 
 

Engineering design documentation
 
This documentation set is essentially complete at the end of the installation phase, and before production starts on the plant. The technical engineering documentation consists of several complex compound documents including technical drawings and descriptive text covering process plant design, theory of operation, control schemes, maintenance, training etc. with extensive need for cross-referencing between sections.
 
There are normally several sources of the information, (design and construction contractors, process licensers, equipment vendors, end users, etc.) with incompatible proprietary formats, and major investment or standardisation is required to create an integrated intelligent environment. Standard document and document content classification at this level would form the basis for the later operations-related documents.
 
 

Selective re-publishing
 
There are requirements for selective re-publishing/ re-use of sections of Procedures and other design documentation, as extracts for training, for the creation of 'major job folders' for scheduled maintenance tasks, etc.
 
 

Multiple user roles
 
There are several different users, from control-room operators, chemical and control engineers, through to roving field operators, all requiring their own particular 'view' of the total information hierarchy.
 
 

The Process Operations Requirements
 
The majority of the specific process operations documents are characterised as reports which are generated as part of the operations activity, by the operating company. They form an information pool from which lessons can be learned related to production efficiency and safety, and hold the potential for being a key knowledge base for interactive and automated decision support systems.
 
 

Daily Work Instructions & Shift Hand-Over Reports
 
The shift hand-over report is a particular class of activity report which typically contains a manually entered log of actions taken, cross referenced to a planned schedule of activities, plus a descriptive statement of the state of the plant at the end of an operational shift. It may also contain some important process measurement data.
 
It is a key document for ensuring continuity of operations, and ideal electronic implementations would involve elements of word-processing including highlighting, and work-flow management. The shift reports are likely to contain the first-level records of root-causes of loss-related incidents, and each entry in the log may require a separate classification of importance and cross-reference information.
 
The Shift Report records are also the primary reference document from which a new shift team will familiarise themselves with the state of the plant over the last few days e.g. after vacations etc.
 
 

Other Production Activity Reports
 
There are additional requirements to incorporate current data for process values within other operations activity reports which are currently manually entered, but which are expected to be served by in future by Microsoft OPC technology [Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control] which provides standardised open access to process control variables within e.g. EXCEL and WORD. Standard production reports are routinely created by the control systems, and by higher-level business applications using control-system databases.
 
 

Standardised coding of document information content
 
There is currently no standard for the classification of process control documentation content. With such a standard in place, pre-defined reference codes could be allocated either manually, or automatically, during the authoring of production activity records to assist document searching. The extent to which this is required may be offset by increasing use of Intranet Search Engine technology, although some standardisation of terminology will still be required to support efforts to automatically locate reports of previous experience based on identified plant states. It will be necessary to augment the reference coding by adding links to subsequent incident reports or to proposals for design modifications.
 
 

Activity progress records
 
Summaries of operating and maintenance procedures are frequently re-published as 'tick-lists' in order to track and record progress of complex procedures and maintenance activity. Such records often require several operating shifts before they are completed, and then they need to be filed as part of the activity report and may be incorporated in the Shift Hand-over report. The records may contain notes related to issues arising during the activity, and they need to be easily indexed for retrieval.
 
 

Authorised Work Permits
 
Most of the modification and maintenance activity on a process plant requires a specific 'Permit-to-Work'. Similar in some respects to work-flow management systems, the Work Permit information is often critical in the process of assessing the state of the plant, and in assessing the options during abnormal operations. There is no recognised standard for the exchange of such information, and all of the document content classification coding would be equally applicable to this data.
 
 

Document hierarchy navigation
 
The primary operations view of the state of the process is via a dedicated, largely proprietary, control system console. Such systems increasingly are providing standard open access to other non-control applications, and they are the natural 'top-level' navigation screens from which to access related information.
 
Several commercial offerings are currently available for document hierarchy navigation, but they are not based on the 'live operations' screen, and the internal cross referencing and linking is proprietary and manually configured. They also only address the engineering design documentation, and not the operational records.
 
A standardised form of external reference to indexed documentation would bring significant benefits to the engineering of such integrated information systems.
 
 

Context Association for Decision Support
 
The context for the identification of relevant information is the known or inferred state of the plant. This is likely to be the result of a separate (increasingly automated) task of comparing directly accessible process instrumentation parameters, environment data, and production values against a model, and seeking to ascertain from electronic files or from operator inputs the status of maintenance work and the current operational transition phase (e.g. start-up, change of feed, etc.) The associations which could then be made may be:
 
  • Context sensitive display of sections within Emergency and Operating Procedures
  • Context sensitive display of process control application descriptions/ training documentation
  • Context sensitive access to previous incident reports involving similar situations
  • Electronic shift log and daily work schedule progress, and recent activity related to critical process units
  • Current work-permit allocations
  • Context sensitive access to Hazard analysis reports
 
The context for intelligent identification of relevant documents or sections of a document could be additionally defined by
 
  • menu-driven document selection
  • manual text search entry
  • links from other document sections
  • direct target and menu selection from operational process graphic displays
  • indirect inference from recently manipulated plant control variables (related to the context view of the operator display, instrument tag-names).
  • automatic pre-selection upon detection of a defined process plant condition.
  • intelligent direction from within a document, based on real-time retrieval of current process parameters.
 
 

Conclusion
 
With sufficient funds, using today's document management technologies, work-flow applications, Microsoft NT, OPC, and ODBC [Open DataBase Connectivity] technologies , and Intranet technology we could provide customised integrated solutions to some of the requirements, and indeed such packages are commercially available for the design documentation.
 
The key elements of real-time and historical document records cannot yet be well integrated, and there is no common standard context for document content referencing. Traditional approaches to structuring the design documentation and records of operational experience may involve a very formal and probably inflexible database 'form' approach, or a high level of post-event re-entry of information into such forms. An alternative approach using imaginative internal structuring and tagging of information, potentially offered by SGML / XML aligned to STEP, may be the key to providing the flexibility within a standard framework on which the integrated decision support systems for the process industries can be successfully, and cost effectively developed.
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