One of the key tasks facing refining and petrochemical production facilities is to improve the quality of the most marginal petroleum products, as well as improving the economic viability of their production. These parameters can be improved by reducing fluctuation in process variables using the advanced process control system (APCS). APCS is one of the ways to increase production efficiency. The main goals are reducing the instability of process variables by calculating control input transmitted via communication channels to the server of the APCS of the process facility once every minute, as well as forecasting the process behavior. At present, many of the previously implemented systems need to be updated. This is caused by the withdrawal of foreign vendors and the lack of qualified specialists on the labor market. The article addresses the problem of familiarizing technical and engineering employees with the logic of updating and upkeep of APCS. A description of an APCS at a modern oil refinery is provided as well as the likely degradation premises. The article also describes an approach to restoring system performance. The approach includes the following steps: examination of the processing unit, devising a logic for optimizing the unit’s operating procedure, developing a program for step-by-step testing of the process unit, identifying target optimization tasks, developing the control loop, step-by-step testing of the process unit, developing models of virtual analyzers, implementing the models of control loops and virtual analyzers on the APCS server. The following recommendations are given in the paper: to introduce monthly monitoring of APCS run capability to reveal the facts of lower efficiency, and to assess operation of control loops and virtual analyzers. A recommendation is also made to update virtual analyzer models at least once every six months. The changes in the process equipment resulting from major overhauls, cleaning procedures, etc. should also be taken into account when scheduling virtual analyzer models update.
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