(155f) Aligning Ethylene Plant Production Planning with Online Optimization

Ethylene producers are continuously faced with the challenge of reducing margin leakage that occurs between various levels of production execution — from production planning to real-time operations. This challenge arises from misalignment in models, assumptions or actual constraints that may occur over time across the layers of planning and operations. The units across the entire ethylene production process may not be running at their collective optimal to meet ambitious plans, even though individual process units may be pushed to their specific constraints by their respective APC applications. As the planning layer is optimized it is key to align the business process down below all the way to operations. Gaps may arise from slow or inaccurate information flow which leads to margin leakage. Also information about changing asset conditions from the operational layer needs to flow back up to planning. Lack of such information flow on a timely basis hinders the decision agility needed to close the gap between these layers.

AspenTech’s General Dynamic Optimization Technology, Aspen GDOT™ addresses this long-standing issue by using an innovative modeling and optimization approach that combines fundamental planning models with dynamic APC models. This results in the ability to have consistent models, economics and objectives between offline planning and online optimization that ensures best site-wide economic results consistently and on a minute-by-minute basis. Plants can also boost production agility and responsiveness by giving planners a more accurate view of current process conditions and constraints via feedback on updated model parameters from GDOT. GDOT directly inherits APC models & can immediately adjust to any changes in the APC layer.

While real-time optimization applications for ethylene have existed for a long time, sustaining benefits from these applications has been a challenge and required significant process simulation experience. Aspen GDOTâ„¢ is designed to be run and maintained by APC engineers, making it significantly easier to adopt and sustain. Join us in this session for an overview of the technology and how it can benefit your ethylene production sites.