Information Technology (IT) in Chemical Industry

Lecture notes

IT in Chemical Industry

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Information Technology (IT) in Chemical Industry Lecturer: Dr Petar Varbanov CPI2, FIT, University of Pannonia [email protected]

Table of Contents 1.Introduction........................................................................................................................................2 2.Applications in chemical industry tackled by IT...............................................................................3 2.1.Business aspects.........................................................................................................................4 2.1.1.eCommerce: enhancing intercompany productivity.........................................................4 2.1.2.Adaptive Business Networks (ABN): optimising business collaborations.........................7 2.2.Product and process design......................................................................................................10 2.2.1.Process design...................................................................................................................10 2.2.2.Product Design.................................................................................................................12 3.IT solutions used for industry..........................................................................................................14 3.1.eCommerce and business communication................................................................................14 3.2.General computation software.................................................................................................14 3.3.Process simulators....................................................................................................................15 3.4.Tools for optimal synthesis.......................................................................................................16 3.5.Tools for optimal scheduling....................................................................................................16 4.Other literature.................................................................................................................................17

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1. Introduction Information Technology (IT) is applied vastly throughout various industries around the world. The current document focuses mainly on chemical industry, but the discussed principles are generally valid for a wider range of enterprises. The function of IT in modern society, and industry in particular, is in managing information by collecting, storing, transforming, retrieving and supplying vast amounts of critical data. It helps decision makers in every step of the industrial activity life cycle. It is important to realise that IT cannot be considered on its own, in isolation from the other tools employed in any application domain, especially in industry. In fact, IT has already been integrated with: ● Business strategies – including the design and operation of vast business alliances and marketplaces; ● Operational decision making in production; ● Modelling of chemical processes and systems for the purposes of efficient operation and system design; ● etc. This lecture is structured as follows. First, a selection of IT applications in chemical industry, currently receiving much attention, are discussed (Section 2). In Section 3, a review of a number of usful software tools applied in industry and process optimisation is given.

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2. Applications in chemical industry tackled by IT The compilation of an exhaustive list of IT applications tackled in chemical industry is almost impossible. However, a small list to illustrate some essential applications sample can be as follows.: (1) eBusiness / eCommerce, Adaptive Business Networks (2) Computational Chemistry (3) Total Enterprise Management, Supply Chain Management (4) Knowledge Management (5) Process design – flowsheet synthesis, equipment design, sizing of equipment in a flowsheet, etc. (6) Process operation – resource planning, long-term and short-term production scheduling, process control and automation. (7) Process monitoring, risk estimation and disaster warning Each of these applications has its own specifics. Each of them may need computation, communication / data exchange and content management and manipulation, or a combination of those, as illustrated in Figure 1. All these application areas reflect the three major industrial needs which Information Technology is poised to satisfy: ● Complexity management in modelling and everyday operation ● Management of enormous amounts of data by regulating data streams and data storage ● Analysis of the data and generation of useful information These requirements are all geared towards a single goal: increasing the competitiveness of the companies and respectively – their profits, by improved overall company management and efficient decision making.

Applications Computational Chemistry

Supply Chain Management

Operation types

Process design

Risk estimation

Computation

Process operation

Enterprise Management

Process monitoring

Communication Data exchange

eCommerce

Disaster warning

Adaptive Business Networks

Content management and manipulation

Knowledge Management

Applications Figure 1. Industrial IT applications and basic operation types

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2.1. Business aspects The tools which can be used for condicting the everyday business vary from one company to another. Possible components of such systems include Microsoft BizTalk server, the products of SAP AG and in-house developed XML web services. This section discusses the main comcepts of conducting business by chemical industries.

2.1.1. eCommerce: enhancing intercompany productivity e-Commerce is a relatively new way of conducting business. Its main applications nowadays are in areas such as retail of books, airline tickets and travel/holiday reservations. Therefore, the full extent of its current impact on the chemical industry cannot be felt yet. In order to fully exploit the potential of this technology It needs to become pervasive by offering proper interfaces ans user-friendly solutions. Definition: [Oxford English Dictionary] pervasive (adjective) – spreading widely through something; widespread

What does this paradigm mean to chemical industry? A quick look at the IT developments at Dow Chemicals (eBusiness@Dow, 2007) in the past half century sheds some light on the issue. The trend is illustrated in Figure 1. In the first IT applications during the 1960s and 70s the automation and streamlining of the operations within individual production plants was pursued. Later on, during the 1980s the focus was shifted to optimising the operation of entire industrial sites and in the 1990s the scope was further extended to enterprise-wide level. One can easily see that each of these development stages was strengthening the company efficiency and agility, simultaneously paving the way for the following stage. According to Dow (eBusiness@Dow, 2007), each of these changes has also brought significant productivity gains to the respective sites and the company.

Enterprise

1990s

1980s

1960s 1970s

Optimise the enterprise operation

Optimise the operation of entire sites

Streamline and automate plant operation (individual plants)

Figure 2. Focus of the IT developments in the Dow Chemicals company in the past 50 years The next logical step in the IT development at Dow is the expansion to the area of e-

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commerce (eBusiness@Dow, 2007), with which they expect to boost inter-company productivity and optimise the way the whole industry operates. What are, in fact, the benefits that e-commerce brings? There can be at least three: ● Connecting with customers better and faster via online hubs such as Elemica (www.elemica.com) and other Internet tools. ● Improving the way the industry works by introducing and employing standardised technologies for data exchange and communication. One example of this is the introduction of the CIDX Chem eStandards™, discussed below. ● Making better decisions through sharing information and knowledge. It is common sense that good decisions are the informed decisions. Therefore, employing data warehousing, knowledge management and e-learning

Enterprise

1990s

Enterprise level

e-Commerce 1980s

1960s 1970s

Optimise the operation of entire sites

World-wide Streamline and automate plant operation (individual plants)

Figure 3. Dow Chemicals vision for IT expansion All of the enumerated ways of exploiting e-Commerce by industry would be impossible without suitable standards and tools for communication of the necessary data and information. This is where the the Chem eStandards™ kick in. These are the e-Business standards developed specifically for the buying, selling and delivery of chemical products. They are based on the eXtensible Mark-Up Language (XML), the globally-recognized "gold standard" for electronic data exchange. These standards are developed and maintained by the Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX, www.cidx.org) non-profit organization. CIDX is a membership-based organization serving the chemical industry, focused on the development of eBusiness standards, called Chem eStandards, which have become the de facto standards for transacting business electronically in the industry. Chem eStandards provides XML schemas to describe a number of business transactions that support and enable various general business processing models for the chemical industry. Specifically, the Chem eStandards document describes data interchange standards in the following functional areas: 1. Customer/Company Information 2. Product Catalogs/RFQ (Request For Quote) 3. Purchase Orders 4. Logistics

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5. Financials 6. Forecasting 7. Exchange Interactions (information exchange) 8. Product Information 9. Credit Upon Proof of Sale (CUPS) 10. Reporting Detailed information about the standards, including freely available downloads of various editions of the standards, documentation, XML schemas, protocol specifications and examples of their use can be found from the CIDX site www.cidx.org. To give a flavour of the type of documents exchanged by using the Chem eStandards, Figure 4 shows the general structure of an electronic (XML) invoice document. Further, Figure 5 shows the invoice header and body sections.

Figure 4. Chem eStandards XML Invoice general structure

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(a) Invoice header

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(b) Invoice body

Figure 5. Chem eStandards XML Invoice – content details

2.1.2. Adaptive Business Networks (ABN): optimising business collaborations An adaptive business network is a network of companies, collaborating in some set of related market segments. The network focus is on the customer needs and on achieving agile response, preferably in real time, to changes in the state of the network and the external environment. ABN is not a single given software product to install. It rather represents a set of business strategies aimed at improving the overall economic efficiency and profitability of the involved enterprises. There are two main parts of this paradigm aiming at commecrial viability and success. An ABN is both a network-type system and an adaptive system. For a set of enterprises is makes more economic sense to focus on their strengths and perform the activities they can do best and delegate the rest to business partners. More specifically, ABNs are designed with the following properties: ● Agile and demand-driven (aiming at real-time responses) ● Collaborative ● Efficient ● Extensive use of interfaces and leveraging standards ● Adaptive (built for change and friendly to innovation)

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Agility is achieved by closely monitoring market demands and implementing intelligent response mechanisms, so that the signals flow to every company in the network, triggering the relevant responses minimising the disruptions and ensuring smooth changes to product and material flows. This gives rise to a sort of a feeback control scheme (Figure 6). As a result, the network also becomes demand-driven.

Business Goals Network Parameters

ABN Products Services

Sales Customers

Demands

Detect Respond & Adapt

Demand-driven Real-time Built for change Figure 6. Control scheme for ABN agile realtime response Efficiency is achieved by the mentioned focus by the network members on their core competences (Figure 7) - i.e. the activities they do best, and delegating the rest of the activities, which are withing the core competences of other network members or even outside partners. This is often referred to as “outsourcing”.

Interfaces

ABN

Perform what can best. Outsource the rest. Partner

Partner

e-Commerce Partner

Partner

Outsourcing

e-Commerce

Partner

Outsourcing

Technology

Technology

Partner

Collaboration

Partner

Partner

Leverage standards

Figure 7. Collaboration and efficiency factors for ABN One of the means of realising the outlined distribution of activities and outsourcing (Figure 7) is through establishing and maintaining collaboration links between various enterprises. Depending on the degree of collaboration, any given two collaborating partners may be considered as belonging to the same business network or not. As a result, the business

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network becomes collaborative with partners exchanging material and information flows. There are two modes of participation in an adaptive business network: coordinator and partner. While most companies will be partners, many firms will find themselves playing both roles. The implementation of all these concepts heavily employs Information Technology. For instance, all information flows between the partners within the network as well as with external customers and suppliers requires extensive communication, as already discussed in section 2.1.1 “e-Commerce: enhancing inter-company productivity“ above. All communication and transactions are rendered using XML-based communication protocols and web services. This leads to another important feature of ABNs – the use of interfaces and leveraging of standards. This is a very important feature, since developing unified software to serve all possible business actors is inefficient and bulky venture, to which not many potential partners would subscribe. Therefore, by agreeing upon a set of clear open standards for intra- and inter-corporate communication as well as commercial transactions, industrial companies create a productive framework where each one can use a software implementation of their choice while preserving the benefits of prompt communications and e-commerce. Finaly, besides responding to market changes in real time, ABNs need also to support longer-term – tactical and strategic, evolution of its members, organisational structure and algorithms for the sort-term responses. This is an excellent avenue for applying knowledge management systems. including artificial intelligence techniques. This, of course, needs to be further supplemented by appropriate research and development of various models of unit chemical processes, customer behaviour and forecasts of future market conditions. These needs stipulate that ABNs are built for change and friendly to innovation. What ABNs mean to the chemical industry? Depending on its position in the respective supply chain, a chemical enterprise may need to manage either an extensive downstream network (i.e. towards customers), an upstream one (towards suppliers) or both. The chemical industry sector comprises companies with different relative positions in the supply chains. There are companies closer to the raw materials origination. These produce mainlt bulk chemicals, or base chemicals to be used by other manufacturers. Some of the benefits of employing the ABN paradigm, IT and Communications (ICT, or Information & Communication Technologies) are listed below: ● Decreasing processing costs. Chemical industry is characterised by a large number of transactions, many of them of significant value. Therefore, even fractional improvements in these processes can aggregate to quite substantial savings. This is especially true for the basic chemicals industry, where its major potential to increase profit margins lies in the reduction of internal costs, because of the small profit margins. ● Speeding up information flows. The benefit here comes from the accelerated information generation and delivery. Depending on the activity, this can be research and development or trials of various products and processes, or the speed of reaction to customer enquiries and orders, especially the speed of fulfilling the orders. ● Improving information about the market: e-Commerce. Using the e-Commerce tools besides speeding up the transactions, also brings about more continuous and smooth sales, also decreasing the need for personnel conducting routine tasks. ● Extending the market. Using Internet and e-Commerce on large e-marketplaces (e.g. Elemica, www.elemica.com) increases the company visibility to partners and

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customers. Source: SAP AG PERFECTING THE RECIPE FORCOMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY AND ADAPTIVE BUSINESS NETWORKS ADAPTIVE BUSINESS NETWORKS: A STRATEGY FOR MASTERING CHANGE AND EFFICIENCY IN MANUFACTURING

Books on ABN Claus Heinrich, RFID and Beyond: Growing Your Business Through Real World Awareness (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005) , ISBN 0764583352. Claus Heinrich, Adapt or Die: Transforming Your Supply Chain into an Adaptive Business Network (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005) , ISBN: 978-0-471-26543-6 (paper), ISBN: 978-0471-35211-2 (Adobe E-Book).

2.2. Product and process design Other avenues for extensive application of IT are product and process design. At the end of the day, both involve the identification of goals, generation of suitable alternatives satisfying these goals and finally – selecting the best alternative. These activities require evaluation and comparison of usually enormous amounts of discrete options and also feature a number of continuous relationships reflecting performance characteristics. This defines then the corresponding Mixed Integer-Nonlinear optimisation problems. Moreover, very often the execution of these activities is not strictly sequential and a number of iterations may be necessary.

2.2.1. Process design The design of processes for manufacturing a specified set of chemical products is called “Chemical Process Design”. For given products this activity involves ● Process synthesis (1): selection of raw materials and potential chemical and/or physical processing steps via which to obtain the desired products. ● Process synthesis (2): selection of unit operations to carry iut the identified processing steps ● Process synthesis (3): arranging the unit operations in an integrated flowsheet (flowsheet construction) in order to achieve maximum efficiency, profit and minimise resource consumption – most notably to minimise energy requirements ● Final design: appropriately sizing the units ● Layout: arranging the operating units physically

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Figure 8. General procedure for process design Depending on the specific implementation the outlined stages may vary and iteration is needed. One possible arrangement is shown in Figure 8. During the flowsheet construction and later stages of process design, process simulation is often used to evaluate the performance of the processes. These and other software tools are discussed later. Major issues in process design, which allow bringing down the overall process costs, are: ●

Minimisation of the consumption of any primary resources and raw materials per unit product. Most notably it is desired to minimise the use of energy and water. This is necessitated mainly by the high energy and resource prices and the fact that often these costs take significant shares in the overall expenses.

●

Minimisation of the emissions of various chemicals and heat into the environment. This is dictated by the need for preserving and improving the environmental conditions and the quality of life. One specifically grave issue becomes the release of greenhouse gases and CO2 in particular.

●

Minimisation of the capital costs of the process. In many cases this is the dominating cost item. This was the case until recently, while the energy prices used to be relatively low. Currently, the rising oil prices shift the significance towards the operating (mostly) costs.

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Books on Process Design Robin M. Smith, Chemical Process Design and Integration (Wiley, 2005) , ISBN 0471486817. Warren D. Seider, J.D. Seader, Daniel R. Lewin, Product and Process Design Principles: Synthesis, Analysis, and Evaluation (Hardcover), (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004) , ISBN: 0471216631.

2.2.2. Product Design Product design problelms are formulated and solved in order to find aswers to questions such as: ● Which current products are in need of replacing? ● What new products need to be developed Applied to chemicals, the procedure is known as Chemical Product Design. It involves definition or discovery of certain needs – either internal or those of customers, generation of options (chemical products) capable of satisfying those needs and then screening and selecting the best options. For this purpose, the Chemical Product Design problem is usually formulated as one of mathematical optimisation. The overall procedure is sketched in Figure 9. As can be seen, an important feature of the algorithm is that it usually requires reiteration and repeating all or part of the steps. Example goals of Chemical Product Design can be: ● Finding a chemical product which exhibits certain desirable or specified behaviour ● Finding an additive which when added to another product improves its properties and/or performance. Regarding methods, usually a number of potential products are formulated by chemistry experts and an optimisation tool is used to evaluate their performance and choose the best options. Selecting more than one final product may be desirable. Most commonly this can be caused by very close performance of certain chemical products or the presence of the company in more than one market segment – e.g. one segment for a “premium” product (i.e. high performance – high price) and another lower segment (low performance – low price). The options selection usually proceeds with determining the feasibilty of each product and then evaluating its performance according to the formulated goals. The feasibility assessment involves evaluation of various constraints such as whether the chemical in question satisfies the requirements for health and safety, permitted impact on the environment and possibility to manufacture. The latter assessment, in fact, requires that a process for the manufacturing of that product be designed.

Lecture notes


Figure 9. General procedure for product design Books on Product Design E. L. Cussler, G. D. Moggridge, Chemical Product Design (Cambridge University Press, 2001) , ISBN 0521796334. Warren D. Seider, J.D. Seader, Daniel R. Lewin, Product and Process Design Principles: Synthesis, Analysis, and Evaluation (Hardcover), (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004) , ISBN: 0471216631.

Academic papers on Product Design R. Gani, (2004), Chemical product design: challenges and opportunities, Computers and Chemical Engineering, 28:2441–2457.

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3. IT solutions used for industry There exist a number of tools for performing process modelling – simulation and optimisation. Both activities are important for implementing process and product design, as well as improving the performance of existing running chemical processes. Also, the ecommerce and networking activities are performed using software from different vendors, the most famous being SAP AG. Some tools popular in industry and academia are briefly outlined below.

3.1. eCommerce and business communication There are two big players in this field and these are SAP AG and Microsoft. The former is the vendor of a suite of tools for corporate management and e-commerce. SAP provide software products for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The company's main product is SAP ERP. see http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx SAP ERP is the one of five major applications within the company's overall package. The four other applications are: •

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

•

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

•

Supply Chain Management (SCM)

•

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

More information can be found on the company's web site http://www.sap.com. Microsoft's BizTalk (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx) is another major product on the market. This is is a business process management (BPM) server. It is often referred to as simply "BizTalk". Through the use of "adapters" which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in a large enterprise, it enables companies to automate and integrate business processes. Offered by Microsoft, it provides the following functions: Business Process Automation, Business Process Modeling, Business-to-business Communication, Enterprise Application Integration and Message broker.

3.2. General computation software For general computation activities such as simple process modelling, chart plotting, and implementing customised models for the mainstream process simulators and optimisers, a number of products can be used, such as:

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●

Matlab (offered by Mathworks Inc., www.mathworks.com)

●

Mathcad (offered by Mathsoft Engineering & Education recently acquired by Parametric Technology Corporation ), see its web site: http://www.ptc.com/appserver/mkt/products/home.jsp?k=3901

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MS-Excel (part of the MS-Office suite), http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

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OpenOffice.org Calc (part of the Sun's open source office suite), www.openoffice.org

It is necessary to note that especially Matlab has become very popular within the engineering community and is also used to perform large-scale and complex modelling tasks, including process optimisation. Another industry success is the use of MS-Excel for online recording of industrial plant data supplied by the measurement equipment.

3.3. Process simulators There are also many process simulators on the market, most popular of which are ASPEN Plus (Aspen Technology, Inc. , www.aspentech.com), HYSYS (initially developed by Hyprotech Ltd, currently part of Aspen Technology, Inc.), ChemCad (by Chemstations, Inc., http://www.chemstations.net) and gPROMS (by Process Systems Enterprise Ltd., http://www.psenterprise.com). All these are commercial, proprietary products, developed and maintained by well established companies usually combining software products with engineering consultancy services. In the sea of tools available, it is also possible to find one, named ASCEND, which is an open-source project (under GNU General Public License). It is developed and distributed by a team of scientists from the Chemical Engineering Department at the Carnegie Mellon University, led by Professor Art Westerberg. The project home page is: http://ascend.cheme.cmu.edu/ This is a flexible process modelling environment suitable for both process simulation and optimisation. It offers: ● An object-oriented model description language for describing your system ● An interactive user interface that allows you to solve your model and explore the effect of changing the model parameters ● A scripting environment that allows you to automate your more complex simulation problems. Figure 10 shows an example screenshot from a converged simulation of ASCEND, taken from the tool tutorial. The picture illustrates two major points – the object-oriented nature of the ASCEND models and the clear user interface. In addition, the tool provides also other aids to modellers, such as an incidence matrix. The latter is a very useful debugging tool when complex models consisiting of hundreds or thousands of equations, enormously improving the modeller's productivity.

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Figure 10. Screenshots from a converged simulation in ASCEND

3.4. Tools for optimal synthesis Currently, for optimal synthesis of process flowsheets, a number of different tols exist, with none yet providing a complete standalone functionality. Some popular software applications include ● PNS (general process synthesis using P-graph (www.p-graph.com), developed by the Department of Computer Science, University of Pannonia (www.dcs.unipannon.hu) ● SPRINT - Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis, developed by the Centre for Process Integration, The University of Manchester Many researchers also use GAMS (GAMS Development Corporation, www.gams.com) and other general modelling/optimisation tools to perform process synthesis and design.

3.5. Tools for optimal scheduling For optimal process scheduling, two major paradigms can be used: S-graph (www.sgraph.com), and Mathematical Programming (GAMS).

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4. Other literature Bibliography eBusiness@Dow, 2007: Kepler, D., E., Redefining Business Process in the Chemical Industry, 2007, http://www.dow.com/ebusiness/news/ebspeech.htm