چارچوب مبتنی بر هستی شناسی برای نظارت بر روند تعمیر و نگهداری در کارخانه نفت

In production plants, monitoring and maintaining industrial processes and emergency shutdowns are not straightforward tasks due to the large number of events and alarms which are triggered during the plant shutdown process. It is also vitally important to provide decision support to stakeholders for efficient and effective monitoring and maintenance of production process. This paper presents a novel framework and design to enhance maintenance decisions based on the knowledge gathered through the process of monitoring. This monitoring process is based on signals which are triggered during the plant safety shutdown process. We have designed and implemented a framework using an ontology and business rules to define the logical structure and operation of the petroleum plant with the objective of monitoring the cause and effect of the petroleum plant shutdown process. To enhance maintenance decisions, we have extended the ontology and the framework to ensure that decision makers have sufficient information to make the right decision at the right time. The proposed extended framework is designed, implemented and evaluated using an example petroleum production plant as a case study.

Monitoring and maintenance are the most important activities in production plants. The objective of plant monitoring is to maintain the production process and minimize plant failure time. In addition, maintenance activities can assist the production plant by reducing maintenance costs and downtime in the production process. Most production plants have implemented automated safety shutdown systems to protect the production plant of and avoid hazards. These shutdown safety systems are mainly implemented as part of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (Chan, 2005). Identifying and monitoring the cause and effect of the plant shutdown process is not a flexible task, due to the large number of events which occur and alarms which are triggered during the plant shutdown process. Furthermore, monitoring and maintaining safety shutdown devices is a major concern in most production plants. Although these systems are efficient, they have several limitations which have not yet been addressed in many automated systems. These limitations become apparent when there is a need to make certain modifications to the plant structure. Various physical modifications are regularly needed in production plants. Such physical modifications to a plant also necessitate respective modifications to the logical plant structure. However, one of these limitations is that the majority of existing systems (ABB Technology, 2010; Rockwell Automation, 2010; Siemens Industry, 2010) cannot be modified by the domain expert when the company requirements change or physical modifications to the plant are conducted. Also, the flexibility of creating one's own business process rules is not always an option in many existing systems (Chan, 2005; Klose, 2002; Uraikul, Chan, & Tontiwachwuthikul, 2007). Another limitation is a lack of data for maintenance decision support and/or structured approach for historical data storage. We propose a novel design for the monitoring and maintenance of a production process using an ontology and business process rules to overcome the existing limitations. The framework consists of two layers: the structural layer and the operational layer. In our previous work, we designed and presented the application of the structural layer (Elhdad, Chilamkurti, & Torabi, 2011). In this paper, we present the application of the operational layer to support maintenance.