Advanced process control maintenance capital project management and continuous improvement

Abstract

The typical lifespan of Advanced Process Control (APC) projects has been reported to be 18 months to 48 months. This is relatively short considering the process units they serve have a life span of 20-30 years. Briefly, this indicates a major discontinuity in process industries. Most APC’s obtain benefits by increasing throughput to the process units they serve. Nominal increases in capacity given for the APC project have been 3-5% based on several literature surveys and interviews with industry experts. The payout period, therefore, is very short, 2 months to a year, depending on the overall value of the product and the cost of the APC implementation.

The overall life span for a project that yields this high return in the process industries should be very long – approaching the life span for the equipment in the field. Further, the process of creation and abandonment of the APC project seems to be repeatable over several different industries.

Three separate but interdependent processes were identified as aims for this research. The aims of this research are: Aim 1). Maintenance – Mathematical models for optimum maintenance intervals and optimum cash flow from an APC are developed. These models are dimensionless to apply to a wide variety of industries. Aim 2). Capital – Models for developing the installation costs have been developed. Further testing is required to understand the variabilities of these models. These models consider workforce costs, workforce requirements, size of the APC, and steps required to implement the APC. The effects of the size of the APC and cash flow from the maintenance are explored on the overall return of the APC project. Aim 3). Continuous Improvement – This portion models the overall yield from an APC and potential follow-on increases due to organizational learning. The follow-on increases are bounded by maximum APC performance. This section explores the maximum APC performance as well as organizational learning curves as applied to the recalibration costs and how those costs affect the optimum recalibration intervals and cash flow from the APC.

Ultimately, implementing these activities has an impact on the life cycle of APC to that of the processing unit. This is beneficial to improve the cost-benefit of implementing APC and the efficiency of productivity.