Process Control & Optimization
Overview
Process control and optimization (PCO) is the discipline of adjusting a process to maintain or optimize a specified set of parameters without violating process constraints. The PCO market is being driven by rising demand for energy-efficient production processes, safety and security concerns, and the development of IoT systems that can reliably predict process deviations. Fundamentally, there are three parameters that can be adjusted to affect optimal performance.
- Equipment optimization: The first step is to verify that the existing equipment is being used to its fullest advantage by examining operating data to identify equipment bottlenecks.
- Operating procedures: Operating procedures may vary widely from person-to-person or from shift-to-shift. Automation of the plant can help significantly. But automation will be of no help if the operators take control and run the plant in manual.
- Control optimization: In a typical processing plant, such as a chemical plant or oil refinery, there are hundreds or even thousands of control loops. Each control loop is responsible for controlling one part of the process, such as maintaining a temperature, level, or flow. If the control loop is not properly designed and tuned, the process runs below its optimum. The process will be more expensive to operate, and equipment will wear out prematurely. For each control loop to run optimally, identification of sensor, valve, and tuning problems is important. It has been well documented that over 35% of control loops typically have problems. The process of continuously monitoring and optimizing the entire plant is sometimes called performance supervision.
Applicable Industries
- Transportation
- Equipment & Machinery
- Chemicals
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Market Size
The advanced process control market is estimated to reach USD 1.4 billion by 2020; growing at a CAGR of 11.79% from 2014 to 2020.
Source: Markets and Markets
Case Studies.
Case Study
The Veolia Vision Air customer portal
Veolia supply water treatment equipment and services to a range of industries. It serves customers in the pharmaceutical industry, food and beverage, chemical processing, power, research and healthcare. Customers in these industries rely on water treatment to keep their businesses operating efficiently, as any decline in the quality of water in those processes means increased cost.Veolia wanted to use the latest technology that the internet makes possible to create a better experience for its customers in the countries across Europe. It wanted to give it customers instant access to their service scheduled, service reports, documentation, orders, contract coverage, and live feeds of data from their Veolia equipment, all while putting Veolia's support support team just a click away.
Case Study
A Solution for All Traffic Solutions
All Traffic Solutions is looking for a solution that can provide the following features: - Required a higher value-add solution to offset commoditization - Needed to control 3rd party products as if they were ATS products - Needed to migrate custom modelling and data from prior solution - The growing install base was increasingly difficult to manage and maintain due to separate silos for business and device systems
Case Study
Creating an Agile Environment to Drive Growth in the IoT
Numerex needed to provide innovative products and service offerings and adapt to the explosive growth in the IoT/M2M ecosystem. As Numerex was transforming into delivering on-demand offerings to its wide range of markets, they realized their back office systems weren’t capable of providing flexible feature sets, critical to helping turn up new product catalogue configurations to close deals and better manage service offerings. An example of this needed flexibility would allow a Numerex customer to buy devices in bulk yet only pay for those that actively use data on the network. Their systems required significant development efforts to introduce new service offerings such as this. They had segregated billing systems that didn’t scale for high volume processing requirements. Numerex was also growing via M&As, which brought the additional challenges of outdated technologies and a variety of disparate billing systems that didn’t talk to each other, resulting in complex operational expenditures and integration requirements. It became so dire that Numerex was forced to implement manual billing processes for certain lines of business.