Page 41 - Industrial Plant 2015

extremely useful that the supplier has already a
significant expertise on the process, even more
important is a continuous exchange of information with
the customer in order to design and implement the APC
application.
In this specific case, ABB and the customer created a
very integrated, cohesive and proactive team and with
experience in various disciplines: from Process
Technology to Energy Management, from Plant
Automation and Instrumentation to Plant Production
Management.
ABB and the customer have cooperated in all the
project phases:
• Initial Design;
• Functional Specification issue and review;
• Base control loop consolidation – instrumentation
and actuator review, PID tuning;
• Process Model Identification;
• APC System Configuration;
• APC System Integration with Plant DCS;
• Pre-commissioning and test.
Several factors contributed to create a particularly
complex and challenging project. Among them, we can
mention:
• Execution schedule - short and challenging;
• Integration challenges – Multiple, separate
automation systems covering evaporation,
Powerhouse and steam turbines sections.
Regarding the project schedule, it is important to notice overall process management, during the tests and the
the normal production run for this type of plant is some
3-4 months per year. Sugar beet availability is in fact
limited over the year and that influences the duration of •
production campaign.
As known from the general technology background,
plant data collected during normal operation while
performing some small perturbations, the so-called
step tests, are necessary build the APC model. As a
result, the process model identification and all other Fig. 3 - Integrated
APC related tasks could only be executed in this very architecture
short production run.
Based on that, the execution team decided to schedule
all the most important activities, from data collection to
the identification of the model up to the pre-
commissioning over a period of about three months,
from August to October 2013.
To further add to complexity, integration with the
existing Plant Automation Systems required interaction
with three, separate, DCS/PLC systems. The execution
team designed and implemented an integrated solution,
using the OPC DA technology to consolidate the three
separate automation systems into a single integrated
environment using ABB Symphony Plus platform and
implemented the APC system on top of Symphony Plus
platform.
All these steps were executed by using Virtual Machines
configured on a customer pre-existing virtualization
server. One of the two Virtual Machines is dedicated to
offline engineering while a second one operates as real-
time control APC. Both Virtual Machines host OptimizeIT
Predict & Control software modules.
This integrated architecture, presented in the figure 3,
allowed the implementation team to reduce lead-time
and avoid new hardware supply to a site that has
already dozens of servers and workstations to maintain.
Benefits
The APC system showed tangible benefits in the
powerhouse management and, more generally, in the
pre-commissioning. The main benefits reported can be
summarized as:
1-2% reduction of powerhouse average specific
consumption;
• 58% decrease in steam venting in the evaporation
section;
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