Background

Making decisions at the margin means making decisions based on small changes in resources. For a refinery which produces significant number of plus products, it becomes crucial to understand which ones would be right to advertise, produce, optimize without impacting refinery economics.

Solution

Margin Optimization is Refinery Performance Dashboard built on PI vision . Optimization works based upon comparing the costs and benefits of doing a little bit more or a little bit less of an activity. Making decisions at the margin helps to optimize the use of scarce resources. For example, if a company is deciding whether to produce one more unit of a product, it evaluates this by looking at different parameters like demand from market, additional revenue it can generate vs additional cost spent to produce it (higher parameter) and then decide.

Also, supposedly, if the demand for diesel is high from refinery , optimization can be done in hydro cracker and likely if demand for gas is high optimization will be done for catalytic cracker. All this recognized and evaluated using real time data coming from refinery and visualized by remote engineer/operator who would give steer to production team accordingly.

These dashboards help provide an overview to user (operator/engineer) and monitor parameters in real time like Process KPI, Target KPI, run rate, unit capacity, product quality, flash zone temp., RCC temp., margin equivalent per process targets etc. based on respective unit's best achieved performance in recent years. It consists of Process technologies like CDU/VDU, Reforming, Alkylation, Coking, Cat cracking and hydrocracking. Users can view use displays based on technology or the KPI.

This helps users in making accurate decisions. This solution is working live example replicated across Shell refineries and scalable for others as well if some new refinery comes online.