On surveillance and workflow control system design

Workflow control performance is a cornerstone of operational excellence in refining and calculating either the human resources or the materials that belong to a sequence of events constituting a workflow. Controlling events in real life industrial environments and monitoring them through surveillance applications has become mainstream in the refining industry and is changing the maintenance methodology surrounding control assets from predictive to condition based. This has made monitoring and diagnosing control and alarming problems challenging. Identifying specific events in a process and raising an alarm for security and safety reasons is the main point of this article. In brief we present the general system architecture of our proposed solution and an application that uses surveillance video inputs and raises appropriate alarms in case of normal or abnormal workflows. The paper also presents main issues that have been considered during our research on alarming systems and explains the main problems of applying those in industrial environments.