NATIONAL PETROCHEMICAL & REFINERS ASSOCIATION 1899 L STREET, NW, SUITE 1000 WASHINGTON, DC CC

Transcription

1 NATIONAL PETROCHEMICAL & REFINERS ASSOCIATION 1899 L STREET, NW, SUITE 1000 WASHINGTON, DC INTEGRATED WEB-BASED IOMS SYSTEM FOR OPERATING AND MANAGING MOVEMENTS IN TANK FARMS By Parag Mathur Senior Product Development Engineer Advanced Software Products Division ABB Inc. Sugarland, TX Umesh K. Chitnis Manager, Product Development Advanced Software Products Division ABB Inc. Sugarland, TX Presented at the NPRA 2002 Computer Conference November 18-20, 2002 Renaissance Austin Hotel Austin, Texas

2 This paper has been reproduced for the author or authors as a courtesy by the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association. Publication of this paper does not signify that the contents necessarily reflect the opinions of the NPRA, its officers, directors, members, or staff. Requests for authorization to quote or use the contents should be addressed directly to the author(s)

3 Abstract Integrated Web-based ioms System for Operating and Managing Movements in Tank Farms Parag Mathur Senior Product Development Engineer Advanced Software Products Division ABB Inc. - Sugarland, TX Umesh K. Chitnis Manager, Product Development Advanced Software Products Division ABB Inc. Sugarland, TX The ioms (intelligent Oil Movement and Storage) application is used to monitor and control the movement of raw materials, intermediate products, and final products within a tank farm or similar facility. It automates blends, transfers, water drainage, shipments and receipts. It also supports advanced features like dynamic path searches for new tanks at the beginning of tasks and for swing tanks during the execution of tasks. Additionally, the product supports the execution of perpetual tasks for both the continuous receipt of feeds and the continuous shipment of products with automated tank swings requiring minimal operator actions. The server engine is based on ABB s object oriented AiEM engineering platform. AiEM is based on Gensym s G2 software product that inter-operates in a client-server relationship. The server can interface with any DCS/SCADA system that has an OPC server available. This DCS platform independence is one of the major advantages of the application. The application gets all tank related data as well as equipment status information using OPC subscriptions. Additionally, the engine supports the ability to subscribe to COM events which provides the capability to interface with standard Refinery/Tankfarm Databases such as LIMS and TIMS. The ioms client operator station is the tool used by plant operators for creating and managing tasks for material movements. The operator interface is web-based. Operators use Microsoft s Internet Explorer to access operator displays. Operator stations communicate with the server via an ActiveX Bridge. This software design architecture of the system (i.e. web-based client application) provides the capability for any user, with proper security authorization, to monitor/control the operation of a tank farm via an engineering and/or operator station from any remote location. The sequences generated for the executing tasks are downloaded to the DCS/SCADA system for execution using an OPC/COM based Sequence Table Processor (STP). Additionally, the server is linked to a relational database (e.g. ORACLE ) for hot and cold system restarts as well as for providing data to a variety of reports. This data can easily be shared by other plant applications like a Data Reconciliation System if required. The ioms application has been installed in two existing crude oil terminal facilities and is currently being installed in a 120-tank refinery tank farm. Page 1

4 Offsites Oil Movement and Storage Offsites is an important part of refinery operations. Although it might be occasionally viewed as unavoidable costs for refinery operations, it provides the extremely important functions of increasing the value of the feeds and products related to the process. Effective management and control of offsite operations contributes significantly to the overall profitability of an integrated petroleum refinery. A refinery typically has offsite operations for transporting and preparing the crude feeds and blending operations for preparing the products. Other offsite applications include Terminals and independent tank farms. The benefits achieved from Oil Movement and Storage Applications can be improved tremendously by integrating them with other refinery applications like planning and scheduling systems and Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS). These additional benefits are realized as a result of improved utilization of storage and equipment, improved blending throughput and faster ship turnarounds. This paper will discuss the Oil Movement and Storage (OMS) application and the benefits of integrating the OMS applications with other applications as well as making the OMS applications easily accessible. OMS applications are used to monitor and control the movement of raw materials, intermediate products, and final products within a tank farm or similar facility. ABB Inc. s ioms (intelligent Oil Movement and Storage) is one such application. It optimizes the planning and execution of receipts, transfers, blends and shipments in refinery offsites and terminals. The package improves utilization of storage and equipment, eliminates material contamination and automates enforcement of safety, environmental and operational procedures. Each material movement is referred to as an ioms task. The application supports path selection, lineup, startup, control, monitoring, shutdown, and reporting for: Tank-to-tank transfers Tank material circulation Tank water drainage Batch receipts and shipment, via pipeline or ship Perpetual pipeline receipts and shipments Perpetual unit feeds and rundowns Sequential and simultaneous blending The application performs the following functions for managing the tasks: Receives data from field instrumentation and gauges and calculates inventories Monitors and controls material movement for the various types of tasks Selects field equipment for executing the movements Automatically generates operation sequences and downloads these sequences to the underlying control system for execution Prepares and maintains data for inventory management and accounting functions Monitors field equipment for alarm conditions; and maintains a list of out-of-service equipment Provides status and summary information for the movements that can be accessed by both the client operator stations as well as external applications/information systems. Page 2

5 Software Architecture The underlying engineering tool for the application is the AiEM (ABB Intelligent Enterprise Manager) product also developed at ABB. AiEM is based on Gensym s G2 and Telewindows software products that interoperate in a client-server relationship. G2 runs on the AiEM server which is a PC running Windows NT or Windows It provides a complete knowledge-based development environment for creating and deploying real-time intelligent applications. Additionally, G2 is an object-oriented language that provides the ability to create a class hierarchy of the various elements required for an OMS application. Equipment and tasks are intelligent objects, generated from an extensive library of objects from the process industries. Each field equipment object is connected to others and understands it s relationship to all other objects connected to it. This equipment includes tanks, valves, pumps, and even the pipes connecting various equipment. The hierarchy of the application topology is shown in Figure 1. The Plant represents the facility that is being managed by the product. Each Module is a main physical or functional subsection of the plant. Groups are physical or functional areas within each module. They may represent P&I drawings. PLANT MODULE MODULE MODULE GROUP GROUP GROUP Field Elements Field Elements Field Elements Figure 1: The hierarchy of the application topology This functionality has been used extensively in the application and enables it to provide a gamut of advanced business functionality and end-user tools. For example, this enables engineering personnel to build interactive P&I drawings, configure algorithms (actions) to govern the operation of field equipment and detect and annunciate alarm conditions, and configure and manage the product database where the plant topology, field element specifications and related data are stored. Engineers access G2 via Telewindows on client workstations that again are PCs running Windows NT or Windows Telewindows lets multiple users independently but simultaneously access the same knowledge base. An example server screen is shown in Figure 2. Page 3

6 Figure2: An example of the Application Server Screen An integral component of the product software architecture is the ActiveX bridge. This ActiveX bridge is a GSI (Gensym Standard Interface) based middle-tier executable developed at ABB Inc. that provides four major functionalities to the application: i. It provides the server with an interface to any COM object supporting the IDispatch (Automation) interface ii. Conversely, it exposes all server objects as COM objects that can then be used by external application like VB applications iii. It hosts an OPC server for the application thus enabling any OPC client to retrieve data from the application iv. It provides the product with the ability to publish/subscribe to COM events This is one of the major features of the application since it can be integrated with ABB or any other underlying DCS system that provides a standard OPC server and hence is platform independent. The various applications of the ActiveX bridge that is used by the product will be discussed throughout this paper. Page 4

7 The operator station is the tool used by operators and dispatchers for creating, executing, and managing tasks for material movements. The operator interface is Web-based. Operators use Microsoft s Internet Explorer to access operator displays that are provided from the server. The operator stations are connected to the server using the ActiveX bridge that provides the data to render a number of HTML pages that are then shown on the client workstations. Additionally, based on various COM events being raised by the server, certain ActiveX controls with the operator station pages are activated or inactivated. All data including the P&I drawings, various equipment data and task data are transferred from the server to the client operator stations using the ActiveX bridge. The execution of the tasks from the operator stations involves the generation and execution of various sequence tables that consist of instructions to manipulate field equipment. These sequence tables are downloaded to an OPC/COM based Sequence Table Processor (STP) that sends the commands to the underlying DCS/SCADA system and monitors the status of execution of these tables to be processed in the server. The web-based architecture of the operator stations provides tremendous advantages to the product. Besides providing a familiar GUI in Internet Explorer, the web-based architecture provides easy accessibility to the offsite facility. Since the operator stations are web-based, it is not necessary to be in the control rooms to access the stations. Any user, with proper authorization and access rights on the company network can monitor and/or control the tank farm operation from any remote location using the operator stations. Hence the restriction of having to be physically present in the control room with the DCS displays in order to access the applications is removed and various users like supervisors, planners and engineers can monitor the operation of their tank farms from remote locations. Additionally, since the client is a webbased application running on Windows NT, the deployment and maintenance of the application becomes much easier. Also, the web-based design of the client makes it easy to support multiple languages. An example Operator Station screen is displayed in Figure 3. Page 5

8 Figure 3: An example client Operator Station Screen Another integral part of the product is the ioms Satellite database. This is an ORACLE based relational database that is connected to the server using the ActiveX bridge. The connection to the database and the transfer of data between the two is made using Microsoft s ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) and ODBC(Open Database Connectivity) connections. The Satellite Database is used to save all data related to all the movements executed using the applications. It is also used to log all alarms generated by the application. This data is then used to generate a variety of reports using Seagate Software s Crystal Reports that again are fully integrated into the product. An example of these reports is shown in Figure 4. Page 6

9 Figure 4: An example of a Crystal Report generated using data in the satellite relational database Another important use of the satellite database is for server restarts after unplanned outages of the server while task executions were in progress. This procedure allows for a full recovery of the server in order to facilitate a bumpless transfer to the actual state of the tank farm no matter how long the system outage had been in effect. Hence, the overall product architecture consists of a number of components each contributing towards enhancing the functionality of the product. A diagram of the product system software architecture is shown in Figure 5. Page 7

10 Figure 5: ioms Product Software Architecture Integration with Other Products As mentioned earlier, the application uses the ActiveX bridge which is a standard OPC client and also supports COM interfaces to connect to external applications. This provides the functionality of being able to connect to a variety of applications. As part of ABB s suite of products, the ioms application is completely integrated with an optional Material (e.g. Crude Oil) Planning and Scheduling (MP&S) package. This package helps maximize operational profits by minimizing quality giveaways and ship demurrage, optimizing utilization of production volumes and property pools, and minimizing the number of orders and tanks used by the movements. The MP&S application provides an optimal plan that is an overview of the material balance and usage over a thirty-day period. It also generates a schedule of the optimum movements that need to be executed over a three-day period. The planning and scheduling optimizations are performed using data that is retrieved from the ioms application or third-party databases using the ActiveX bridge. Each scheduled movement order is a planned task that includes information regarding the material involved, amount of material, source, destination, and movement start and end times. These planned tasks are then downloaded to the server using the ActiveX bridge where they are stored until they are further defined and executed by the operators using client operator Page 8

11 stations by converting them to tasks. Figure 6 shows the Planned Tasks list in the client Operator Station. Figure 6: Planned Task list sent by a planning and scheduling application to the Oil Movement application displayed on the client operator station In addition to the MP&S product, various other refinery applications can be integrated with the application with relative ease using the ActiveX bridge. For example, the oil movement application can be integrated with a refinery Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) application that raises a COM event every time new laboratory data is available for a tank and that event can be used to update the data in the product database automatically. Similarly, the application can be integrated with a Tank Information Management System (TIMS) to get various tank related data like volume, flowrate, API etc. using OPC subscriptions. Additionally, since the Satellite database has all the data related to the movements in the tank farm, this data can be easily provided to other applications like Data Reconciliation (DRC) packages. Also, since the ActiveX bridge exposes the various objects in the server as COM objects, the application can be easily integrated with external applications; for example - written in Visual Basic that can access data in the server with read/write capabilities. Examples of such external applications are Midnight and Ad-Hoc Tank Inventory Reports. Page 9

12 Advanced Functionality provided by the Application The object oriented design of the application provides the capability of achieving a variety of advanced features in the product both from a business as well as a software perspective. Since all equipment and tasks are intelligent objects, they contain a plethora of information that helps in the management of the tank farm. Each tank object understands it s relationship to all other objects that it is connected, the piping capacities, associated valves, pumps, and instrumentation. The connectivity also enables the system to understand the relationship between materials and products. Additionally, the connectivity allows the system to dynamically search for the most optimum paths between a defined source and destination(s). These optimal paths can be generated by using a number of criteria like consideration of equipment commitment and utilization, use of minimum numbers of manual field elements, minimum displacement volume, or other site-specific criteria. Another advanced functionality of the application is the association of the various equipment such as tanks, valves, pumps etc. with rules that are designed to prevent damage, errors in use and violations of environmental regulations. The object-oriented design of the product allows the implementation of these rules to all instances of a particular class or just certain instances. Rules are also applied to tasks to prevent cross-contamination, minimize product degradation, manage inventory, verify material balances and setup float paths to prevent thermal expansion that could cause equipment damage. An easy to use drag and drop engineering interface provides the ability to configure additional site-specific rules in the system. These rules are referred to as action-styles in the product. They contain highly efficient action objects represented by intuitive icons that carry out real-time inferential, mathematical and logical calculations at high speeds. Tools are provided for automatic and fast replication of action-styles across objects. Hence, the product can be very easily customized for different clients based on their operational requirements. An example of an action-style is shown in Figure 7. Figure 7: An example of an action-style used for configuring operational rules. Page 10

13 An extremely powerful functionality provided by the application is the concept of Perpetual Tasks. As the name suggests, these are tasks defined in the product that are supposed to run indefinitely. Examples of such tasks are receipt of crude oil production into the tank farm and shipment of crude from the tank farm to pipelines. The application allows for the definition of such perpetual tasks that include all the potential source/destination tanks that can be used by that movement. Once the task is then started in the application, the server monitors the movement and automatically swings the source/destination tank when required. It selects the swing-to tank based on a number of criteria including material compatibility, tank commitment and utilization and amount of material or space in the tank. Hence the amount of operator intervention required to execute the perpetual movements is greatly minimized. Since the ActiveX bridge exposes the various server objects as COM objects, and they are accessed such by the client operator stations, it is extremely easy to access the various attributes of the objects with read/write capabilities. For example, it is trivial to view the material in a tank as also to place any field equipment in and out of service. Additionally, since the tasks are also objects, they are associated with all equipment that they use and this information is also available in the operator stations. Another advanced feature of the product is the ability to support multiple languages. This is a very useful feature as far as the internationalization of the product is concerned since most tank farm operators are not conversant in English in many parts of the world. The current product supports English and Spanish. However, additional languages can be easily added. The client operator station utilizes the Microsoft Windows Regional Settings for many of the translations. Another advanced feature of the product is the ability to support both mass and volume based movements. Additionally, the user can specify the particular display units to be used for a number of variables like tank levels, volumes, flowrates etc. This is a very useful feature since it allows for the product to be very easily customized to the needs and preferences of the end-user. Benefits Benefits of using the application result form increased shipping and receiving efficiency (higher tankage, pipeline and berth utilization), reduced tankage and pipeline use for movements, reduced inventory, reduced quality giveaway, improved component upgrading, reduced stock losses and reduced field manpower. Total refinery benefits can range from 10 to 20 cents per barrel of crude processed. From a software perspective, the web-based operator interface provides tremendous benefits in terms of remote accessibility and ease of use, maintenance and deployment. Additionally, the ability to integrate the system with the MP&S package can tremendously improve operating efficiency and inventory management. Integration with other refinery packages like LIMS, TIMS and DRC applications also result in very significant economic and operational benefits. Page 11

14 Commercial Installations The ioms product has been installed in two existing crude oil terminal facilities and is currently being installed in a 120-tank refinery tank farm. One of the crude oil tank farms has implemented the application integrated with the MP&S application. It has 20 tanks with a storage capacity of approximately 2.4 million barrels. It receives 7 different types of crude via pipelines. The tank farm processes and blends these crudes to feed a number of pipelines and a shipping terminal. The implementation of the products has resulted in: i. Improved tank utilization, resulting in approximately 5% increase in maximum storage levels ii. Reduction in slop generation of approximately 50% iii. Faster loading of ships (reduced demurrage) due to better operational practices iv. Improved inventory control and reduced discrepancy between ship and shore custody transfer numbers v. Reduction in potential tank spills and subsequent environmental impact and crosscontamination, due to operating errors. vi. Improved utilization of operations staff from allowing operators to effectively monitor several movement activities at the same time. References Brooks, Robert, Experiences with Oil Movements and Storage (OM&S) Systems within Integrated Refinery Management Systems, NPRA Computer Conference, November 1993 Operator Station for intelligent Oil Movement and Storage User s Guide, ABB Inc. Intelligent Oil Movement and Storage (ioms) Engineering Guide, ABB Inc. Page 12