I received the following message from Maurice Wilkins of WBF, who is also managing director for a new standard being developed by ISA for Modular Procedural Automation in the process industries. I am currently working on a strategy report that will be released by ARC in June on this very same topic. Most of the incidents that we have witnessed in the process industries in recent months involve some sort of procedural element where proper operating procedures were either not followed or not well defined. The drain of knowledgeable and experienced personnel in the process industries is only exacerbating this issue. ISA 106 aims to remedy this situation by providing a standard framework for automating procedures. Several major end users are already supporting this standard and I am positive we will see rapid acceptance because of the overwhelming need.
ISA-106 Procedural Automation in the Continuous Process Industries
Every year managing process operations becomes more challenging. With continued emphasis on becoming lean and streamlining operations companies are trying to improve plant performance with fewer resources. Additionally, each facility needs to meet health, safety and environmental regulations with increased pressure from corporate management for improvements. Adding to these challenges they also have to deal with the demographic trend of an aging workforce. Many of their senior operations personnel are retiring with less experienced operators taking their place.
When procedures have been automated in continuous processes, often they are implemented using ad-hoc design and programming techniques that yield difficult to maintain code. While this can provide short term operational benefits, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of these procedures is higher than needed due to increased costs to change and update the procedures over time and the lack of re-usable software modules. In fact a 2008 survey by the ARC Advisory Group indicated that continuous manufacturers are now seeing effective and repeatable transition management along with the use of sequence based operating procedures as a competitive advantage, but in the continuous process industries, there is no current standard they can use to base their procedures on. The safety aspect of automating procedures is a critical component and should also not be overlooked. The cause of some recent industrial accidents has been, in part, due to the lack of a good procedural based emergency shutdown or an abnormal situation putting too much pressure on an operator in a crisis, causing him/her to improperly perform procedural operations with disastrous consequences. It is known that procedure based recovery from abnormal situations is faster and more reliable than recovery based on random operator knowledge.
At present, the use of prompted and automated procedures is typically a rarity in continuous processes, due to the lack of general industry expectations and standards. However, with increased focus on operational excellence there are now more and more business drivers requiring increased safety, improved throughput, cost savings, knowledge capture, and improved capture of years of operational experience that will soon be lost to retirement.
Recognizing the issues, a proposal was submitted to ISA to form a new standards committee addressing procedural automation in the continuous process industries, using a modular approach in the same way as the ISA-88 standard does. Modularity can also provide companies the ability to standardize functions across plants, sites and the enterprise achieving corporate wide repeatability and reproducibility. This would help reduce engineering labor and cost, provide consistent operations, and lower TCO.
On April 15, 2010, ISA approved the proposal to form a new standard committee to address procedural automation in the continuous process industries: ISA-106. Dr. Yahya Nazer of The Dow Chemical Company and Marty King of Chevron will be co-chairs and Dave Emerson of Yokogawa the vice chair/editor. The aim of the committee is to develop an initial technical report as the basis for the new standard by June 2011. The first meeting of the ISA-106 committee is planned for June 9 and 10, 2010 in Houston. The new standard is already supported by several major manufacturers including Dow, DuPont, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and Valero plus most of the major suppliers.
