Practical Aspects for Exploration and Analysis of Manual Interventions in Process Plants

Abstract

A high degree of automation is an essential factor for smooth operation, to be economically viable and in many parts of the industry a de-facto standard. Nevertheless, manual interventions and operations are ever present, especially in those sectors that deal with large variations and uncertainties. For example, in waste incineration, the composition of waste varies significantly making a steady, efficient, and automated incineration very difficult. Similarly, the recovery from safety-/load-related trips is often not automated due to the large number of potential causes. These manual activities are recorded as part of the regular audit trail and stored in historians or databases. Yet, they are rarely analyzed which makes them a blind spot in the ongoing activities for digitization and Industry 4.0. We provide an overview of state-of-the-art techniques to perform case and workflow mining, our experience in analyzing two industrial data sets and our pipelines established during that activity.