(25a) Operational Excellence in Refinery Distillation Better Decision Faster

Operational Excellence results from making better decisions, faster, and then perfectly and consistently executing those decisions. In this paper we discuss how Simulation-based unit monitoring has been successfully applied to crude distillation units. Simulation-based monitoring enhances traditional unit performance monitoring by providing governance of data quality based on fundamental physical and chemical laws. In addition the simulation provides a richer set of analytic data which is more meaningful than raw measurements (for instance exchanger fouling factors and column performance parameters, instead of raw temperatures, pressures and flows), this allows the end users to make more insightful operational and maintenance decisions. Using this type of tool successfully requires building outputs into workflows, and we therefore discuss best practices for systematically aligning Simulation results with the decisions, tasks and work processes of relevant people in the organization.