Honeywell UOP today introduced a new software-based service to the Middle East designed to allow refiners and petrochemical and gas processing plants in the region to improve their performance.

With a strong focus on sustainability and productivity in line with the regional growth visions, the process industries in the Middle East are continuously looking at smarter and more efficient ways to run their plant operations.

Honeywell UOP’s new Connected Performance Services (CPS) business leverages the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to tap Honeywell’s deep process knowledge, design expertise, and understanding of catalysis with next-generation software platforms from Honeywell Process Solutions, the leading provider of software-based solutions for the process industries.

The IIoT is of particular prominence in the Middle East due to the vast number of operating plants across the region. At a time when the world is experiencing the uncertainly over oil prices, it’s more important than ever to be connected and efficient, the company said.

“This cloud-enabled service makes plants smarter and more responsive,” said Jim Moshi, Honeywell UOP Middle East regional business manager. “Problems that caused plants to be less efficient or less productive and that went undetected for weeks or months now can be resolved quickly and proactively, and decisions that used to take days now can be made in hours. For many plants, the avoidance of downtime and suboptimal performance, and better agility can be worth millions of dollars per year.”

CPS is one of a number of industry-leading solutions showcased by Honeywell at the Middle East Petrotech 2016 conference and exhibition in Bahrain from September 26 to 29. Honeywell’s display is located at stand # 311 at Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Centre.

The CPS offerings include applications to address critical challenges for refineries and petrochemical and gas processing plants, including better asset utilization, unplanned downtime, energy efficiency, and gaps in expertise as plants becomes more sophisticated and experienced engineers retire. The CPS offerings are part of the larger IIoT ecosystem being built by Honeywell to allow end users to harness IIoT technology to tap the deep expertise of Honeywell UOP and other leading suppliers and partners.

At the heart of the CPS offering is a cloud-based software service that continuously monitors streaming plant data and applies advanced analytics and machine learning, leveraging UOP process models and best practices to find latent or emerging underperformance, alert plant personnel and make specific operational recommendations. The system runs continuously with user-friendly digital dashboards that provide highly intuitive context and actionable understanding of a plant’s performance. The same dashboards are reported simultaneously to a dedicated Honeywell UOP process advisor who also monitors performance and can provide additional direction and resources, it said.

In addition to identifying underperforming assets and anticipating equipment failures and process issues, Honeywell can monitor and help manage energy use to support compliance with stricter regulatory standards, and also can bridge knowledge gaps among personnel who may not be fully experienced with their equipment. Roughly half of the industry’s most highly-tenured staff are expected to retire in the next seven years.

“The unique feature to this solution is the combination of customer operating data and UOP expertise that provides plant personnel with early-stage warnings that identify performance improvements,” Moshi said. “Advancements in software, instrumentation and Big Data capabilities have finally converged, which makes it possible for the first time to offer a cloud-based IIoT solution that brings the connected plant to the oil and gas industries. That combination is made even more powerful by UOP’s century-long knowledge of process technology, equipment, catalysis and commercial best practices.”

Honeywell UOP’s CPS platform is designed around the user experience, providing a practical interface that is easy to read and understand and that provides quick and easy analysis and recommendations.

Operators can get to the bottom of an issue in just a few clicks, giving staff time to address the problem quickly or before it becomes more serious. By leveraging powerful embedded root cause analysis models, it puts critical performance information at the user’s fingertips to improve performance and offers predictive insights to identify issues well before they could result in costly problems, Honeywell UOP said. - TradeArabia News Service