A Modelling, Simulation, and Validation Framework for the Distributed Management of Large-scale Processing Systems

Abstract Petrochemical and chemical complexes are so-called Systems of Systems (SoS) that consist of many subsystems that interact by exchanging energy, material and information. The individual plants or units are managed locally, by human managers and operators or by automatic algorithms, but the efficiency of the overall site depends on the coordinated use and generation of resources and on the balancing of various resource networks, e.g. for steam on different pressure levels, hydrogen, ethylene etc. Therefore global coordination is required, but the local autonomy has to be respected. Coordination of local optimization is currently an active research area. When solutions for site-wide coordination are developed, they have to be tested in faithful system-wide simulations. In this paper we present an innovative framework for modeling, simulation, and validation of large Systems of Systems that integrates physical plant models, local control and optimization algorithms, connecting networks and site-wide coordination algorithms. The framework is described and demonstrated on a coordination problem for an integrated petrochemical site.