Plant information at the desktop-exploiting corporate IT infrastructure

Abstract

A generic solution to the problem of collecting and analysing batch plant data from different control systems has been developed using Microsoft's front and back office product set. It offers low-cost exploitation due to world-wide company standardisation on the MS Office product set. A standard set of event message types have been defined which are now generated automatically by different control systems used in ZENECA. All events are collected in real time and the batch data server configures itself automatically by analysing the data collected to determine product names, batch identities, unit names, operation names, phase names, etc. Plant data is loaded into normalised SQL server data tables whose structure is independent of the original batch control systems. A standard client application has been developed in MS Access which allows users to analyse single and multiple batches and relate process measurements to batch events. It is tightly integrated with other components of MS Office and data can easily be exported into spreadsheets or documents. Validation effort required for specific applications of the validated product set is minimised as it configures itself from the underlying data. The batch data server acts as an interface between the proprietary world of batch control systems and corporate standards for information technology.