Process knowledge generation and knowledge management to support product quality in the process industry by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) open systems

Product quality is the product's fitness for purpose. In the process industry this is dependent on the product's tolerance to production process ‘noise’; this means reducing production variations due to uncontrolled process factors. This requires processes invulnerable to ‘noise’. Time criticality in the process industry can be higher than in discrete manufacturing. Concurrency across the product life-cycle requires applications working together to collect and interpret process data and projecting resultant knowledge to required targets. The applications would be dependent on the ability to cover wide geographic areas and net-based technology is needed. Distributed web applications are emerging to support this; this means that advanced monitoring technology is suitable, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). SCADA open system applications were used for the generation of process knowledge in an oil refinery. A rule-based expert system was used with the SCADA system to generate process knowledge about the states of corrosion of the process equipment. This was projected to process management using configured SCADA screens, supporting process management across a wide spectrum both in terms of physical location and product life-cycle. Emerging open systems and tools such as ArchestrA and NET platforms will make integration easier and more flexible.