(726b) The Effect of Advanced Process Control on the Degradation of Process Knowledge

Advanced Process Control (APC) has become one of the most powerful industry tools for improving process profitability and safety. The ability to map multiple responses to process upset events and control changes allows for the mitigating of upsets and maintaining operation at the higher flows, temperatures, and pressures while avoiding safety events and SIS trips. Knowing that APC will go offline periodically for maintenance, tuning, updates, or due to communications breakdowns, it is important that operators have the ability to react to process changes by utilizing process knowledge and understanding in a timely manner, though this is not expected to rival APC. However, the extensive utilization of APC has resulted in the concern of a loss of process knowledge by operators due to lack of necessity (“use it or lose it”). As such, it is important to understand to what extent, if at all, process knowledge is compromised by the use of APC.

In this project, we will utilize student test groups on simulations and industrial alarm and operator action data in an attempt to understand to what extent and how quickly a degradation of process knowledge occurs when not utilized regularly. This pattern occurred in both student subjects testing and in industrial process data from multiple industry sources. This study found that knowledge degradation appears to be a real issue, but is process and user specific. However, there are some universal behaviors that can be gleaned from the results the allow us to provide procedural recommendations to determine process knowledge loss and ways to mitigate that impacts of this loss.