Using the Process Schematic in Plant-wide Disturbance Analysis

This article describes how isolation and diagnosis of the root cause of a plant-wide disturbance is enhanced when process connectivity is considered alongside the results of data-driven analysis. A prototype software has been designed and implemented which, when given an electronic process schematic of a plant and results from a data-driven analysis of process measurements, allows the user to pose queries about the plant and to find root causes of plant-wide disturbances. The plant topology information is written in XML according to the Computer Aided Engineering Exchange (CAEX) schema.