An on-line simulator MIRROR PLANT for proactive operation and its HMI design

The number of serious plant accidents increases year by year in Japan, where technology transfer of skilled operator involving operation knowledge has ceased to work well. In order to realize safer plant operation, a proactive operation method is proposed in this paper by which operators will be navigated while seeing future plant behavior. The developed method is an on-line dynamic plant simulator MIRROR PLANT that can simulate the dynamic plant behavior accurately and can also forecast the future plant behavior by simulating faster than real-time. Using thus estimated forecast data, the plant operator can detect abnormal situations which would occur in the plant. Prior to an alarm being activated by the conventional control system, the operator will be able to prevent a serious accident. In this paper, a new human–machine interface (HMI) is designed to realize proactive operation for the vinyl acetate monomer process as an example of MIRROR PLANT. (author)