(311a) The Common Model Environment – An Implementation of Model-Centricity in Refinery Planning, Scheduling, and Process Engineering

Decision making in process industries relies on the use of models that represent operation of the equipment, process sites, and the entire supply chain. Different groups within a company develop models for specific business processes in different decision-support tools. Process engineers, for instance, develop rigorous thermodynamic and kinetic models for conceptual design, simulation, and optimization in engineering simulators. Process planners and schedulers develop simpler empirical models for optimizing feedstock purchases, scheduling production campaigns, and blending products in refinery-wide planning and scheduling tools. These organizational modeling silos hinder the sharing and reuse of models across the company.

The Common Model Environment^TM [1] (CME) is, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive model-centric implementation that allows process engineers, planners and schedulers to create and share models in a seamless manner. Using CME can lower model development costs and lead to superior knowledge management through a standardized work process where models are created and maintained by a group of modeling experts and distributed to model users across a company. It provides a consistent basis for making decisions through the reuse of models. CME improves model reliability through the use of rigorous engineering models in planning and scheduling and enables the creation of refinery-wide engineering models through the use of simpler models derived from planning. It also enables the creation of new models from rigorous models that have been tuned to plant operating data through a regression and reconciliation based model development environment.

This paper describes the challenges addressed during the design and implementation of CME. We provide detailed examples of how to 1) convert a planning model such as a short cut distillation model to a CME model, update it from a rigorous engineering column model in a engineering simulator, and reuse the updated model in the non-linear refinery planning tool 2) author a custom model in a high level modeling language and use it everywhere 3) create a CME model that is configured for various modes of operation in planning and scheduling applications from a rigorous engineering model and 4) use simpler forms of a rigorous engineering model in planning and scheduling through automatic model reduction techniques supported in the underlying Open Object Model Framework [2].

[1] Joffe, B.L., Kunt, T. and Paules, G.E. (2008). The Common Model Environment ? A new paradigm for model sharing between process engineering, planning and scheduling. Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations. Boston, MA

[2] Lakshmanan, A., Paules, G., Mahalec, V. (2006). A Modeling Framework That Enables Process Synthesis, Design, Analysis, Optimization, and Planning. Annual American Institute of Chemical Engineers Meeting. San Francisco, CA, (60c)