AspenTech is a leading global software provider that optimises process manufacturing for energy, chemicals, engineering and construction and other industries that manufacture products from a chemical process. With integrated aspenONE® software solutions, process manufacturers can implement best practices to increase capacity, reduce costs, achieve energy efficiency and become more profitable across their engineering, manufacturing and supply chain operations.
Breakthrough innovations in the latest releases of aspenONE allow new and occasional users to become proficient faster, bringing the power of optimisation to more people in engineering, operations, planning and scheduling across the enterprise. Our products represent the industry standard in process optimisation, helping more than 150,000 users at over 1,750 companies drive profitability faster and more efficiently than ever before.
AspenTech solutions helped Essar Oil Ltd. optimise crude evaluation with Advanced Optimisation and Visualisation. Describe the case study in further detail.
Refining margins are tight as crude costs continue to rise, demand weakens and refinery capacity expands. It is now more critical than ever to maximise solutions by choosing the most profitable crudes as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This is just one of the multiple reasons Essar chose Aspen PIMS-AO and aspenONE PIMS Platinum for their refinery needs. Of the many possible benefits, just one has been the dramatically reduced run times for crude cases. With PIMS-AO, what used to take 48 hours, now only takes about four. With AspenTech solutions, Essar now has the power to be more selective with their crude slate choosing the most robust crudes with more optionality, flexibility and ultimately more confidence to meet the refinery plan.
Prior to Essar’s acquisition of the Stanlow refinery in 2011, PIMS had been the solution of choice at the refinery, but Essar was worried about performance and wanted to better understand its solution. They turned to Aspen PIMS-AO to utilise the latest technology to drive even better results. Not only are runs time consuming, but time bound as well in terms of where they start and end. In this time bound parameter, the company must quickly identify the constraints and changes involving numerous runs and make them clearer. Additionally, the analysis of the runs needs to be faster and easy to communicate to the stakeholders.
Essar upgraded to Aspen PIMS-AO and aspenONE PIMS Platinum to achieve faster, more reliable results. With PIMS-AO’s parallel processing, the company evaluates multiple scenarios simultaneously in a fraction of the time used by traditional methods. Coupled with the Multi-Start function, a planner can easily achieve Global Optimum with ease. The company also upgraded to aspenONE PIMS Platinum to answer the question of identifying constraints and hastening crude run analysis in addition to easily communicating the results to stakeholders.
Aspen PIMS-AO’s outstanding performance and Global Optimisation capabilities enabled Essar to greatly reduce local optima, thereby improving reliability in the plan. Additionally, because of PIMS-AO’s parallel processing, the company can now run cases for their more than 150 crudes in a fraction of the time. Total time for indifference is now less than a half-day end-to-end versus the previous two or more working days.
Essar also leveraged the intuitive interface of aspenONE PIMS Platinum to improve its crude selection. With Platinum, the company was able to quickly identify the constraints and changes across a large number of runs as they became more visible and understandable. The easy-to-use interface also enabled faster analysis and simpler dissemination of the results to key stakeholders.
Another piece of the solution included upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server database. Running aspenONE PIMS Platinum on the SQL Server provided unmatched scalability and performance, supporting very large databases and making it possible for numerous concurrent users to access planning models and share real-time enterprise data across the organisation for significantly faster results generation and analysis.
Describe a separate Aspen PIMS-AO case study implementation.
With annual revenues of over $45 billion and more than 10,000 employees worldwide, a global petrochemicals company is a market leader in olefins, utilising multi-site and single-site models for its U.S. assets and creating a complex decision system. Considering that over 100 cases must be evaluated routinely to optimise profit margins and other complexities, they elected to conduct a review of current practices and technology in an effort to be more agile in responding to industry changes.
Using Aspen PIMS-AO, the company was able to take its planning to the next level, addressing critical issues, such as determining the optimum cracking conditions for the company’s assets, the most profitable disposition options for products and what evaluation should be in place for feedstock cracking at certain assets. Additionally, the company turned to AspenTech to maintain its competitive advantage, which would involve enhancing feedstock selection, maximising the variable margins from current assets, operating plants close to true constraints, and enhancing existing work processes to improve efficiency and maximise profitability.
Given the recent changes to the petrochemical industry, this world-class leader was looking for new ways to enhance its existing models. Some of the changes included shifting cracking economics due to increased shale gas drilling, which involved infrastructure investments that bring more NGLs to the market, as well as the surging ethylene cash margins that went from $0.05-0.10/lb on average to $0.30/lb.
The company implemented Aspen PIMS-AO, which is a robust planning solution with easy-to-analyse results to achieve efficiency improvements, improve transparency and effective analysis of planning results, and cultivate opportunities to further improve performance around planning needs. AspenTech enabled the company to explore options that would provide a platform to efficiently view, run and analyse results of planning models, help communicate the plans effectively with plant operations and offer support tools for training new and/or less experienced analysts.
Propos recueillis par Jean-Guy Debord
