Benchmarking of advanced technologies for process control: an industrial perspective

Global competition is forcing industrial plants to continuously improve product quality and reduce costs in order to be more profitable. This scenario doesn´t allow producing in less than excellent performance. Combining higher, more consistent product quality with a larger production volume and an increased flexibility however places special stresses on plant assets and equipment jeopardizing safety and environmental compliance. Consequently, process industries are called to operate on a very narrow, constrained path that needs to be continuously monitored, assessed and adjusted. The talk aims at reviewing the main points of the problem and at discussing how benchmarking practices should include and take advantage of advanced automation technologies. It will briefly consider basics for project justification and what an automation vendor may (really should) do in order to help process industries customer to select the best solutions for their plants. A particular emphasis will be placed on sometimes neglected aspects, such as hardware-software integration issues; life-cycle cost-benefit analysis; and operator acceptance and living with the APC tools and strategies. Finally some basic suggestions taken out of field experience will be given