The European OSIsoft PI System user meet was held in Barcelona earlier this year. René Thomassen presented the use of the PI System at GDF Suez, now an €80 billion revenue utility with operations around the world. GDF Suez has seen major grown through acquisition over recent years. Thomassen was not sure that he had even located all the PI Systems in the group (he computed around 30 in the EU alone) and he invited other GDF PI users to come forward. PI System forms the core of several in-house developed tools for operational support and plant and process information management. GDF’s platform combines SQL Server, PI System and ABB’s MicroSCADA. Thomassen’s presentation showed how prevalent PI System has become in GDF’s power generation, trading and marketing operations. PI is used for operations dashboarding through a GIS front end, in operational ‘cockpits’ leveraging PI WebParts for drill down into plant data, equipment monitoring and bespoke applications to track specific activities. PI Asset Framework is currently being rolled out to replace the legacy reporting system from Ecodata. Thomassen says that quantifying the value of a PI framework is hard but he is ‘sure that the economics are good.’ Detailed performance monitoring reveals opportunities for improvement. Real time data enables proactive maintenance and avoids downtime. PI can be used during plant commissioning to analyze supplier data and ‘force improvements or refunds.’ PI’s rich toolset means GDF can achieve more with internal resources and avoid third party development.
Jassim Al-Shammali and Mohammad Shamsul showed how RasGas was building a real time information system including a monitoring system built around PI. RTIS monitors activity at the LNG Plant and sends alerts by sms or email in event of something abnormal. RTIS’ user base is growing as new interfaces are added and more critical data is available from the system. The PI System surveillance tools and data security were cited as key wins.
Hervé Delesalle (Total) and Tjidde Boers (Magion) described the use of complex event detection for oil field monitoring. Netherlands-based Magion is a process control engineering software house. Total’s field monitoring R&D project seeks to turn raw data into valuable information via a monitoring platform architecture and ‘production intelligence’ in the form of complex event detection. Early results have demonstrated a significant reduction in the time spent on data collection with a noticeable impact on production. The platform includes PI-ACE, WebParts, PI-Asset Framework and Notifications. Magion’s ‘µSuite’ is being trialed for event detection and recognition. The platform allows for asset model management including site structure definition and connectivity to data sources. Microsoft SharePoint and PI WebParts provide visualization. The test case was a shortfall (production loss) detector to identify and ‘understand’ underperforming wells. Production rates are estimated from real time pressure measurement. Wells are modeled as polynomials stored in the production database. As shortfalls are indentified, their causes progressively enrich the µSuite database with flow rate, well potential and context, as defined in Total’s standard classification table. PI-AF allowed good data integration with other reference data sources like SAP. µSuite provided graphical tools to design business algorithms with the PI System and PI AF integration. Presentations available on www.oilit.com/links/1109_15.
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