off-sites

Introduction

Under the umbrella of the ARENA concept Invensys and Shell Netherlands Refinery have rationalized one of the most complex areas of a refinery, the Off-sites. This comprises all operational activities concerning oil movements and blending.

Everything from reception of crudes in the Shell Europoort terminal up to and including the delivery of finished products to Shell customers are being managed by a powerful suite of management and process control software. Not only the horizontal integration of process control of oil movements, but - just as important - also the vertical integration between operational process control-, information- and business applications.
All relevant information about oil movements, inventory and process control end up in a data warehouse which is easily accessible by users on any level. This results in a transparent concept, in which the different cultures (IT, business, and process control) meet and which is suitable for many refineries. It offers more information than before, and by relying on many graphical user interfaces representing movements and product flows it is also easier to use.

ARENA Concept

The target for the ARENA concept was to integrate the cultures of instrumentation, process control and information technology. In order to achieve this, the automation and integrator provider must have detailed knowledge of both IT and Oil movements. Invensys, established for many years in these disciplines, was chosen by Shell to co-develop the concept.

The basic concept is most easily explained by looking at the picture on the left. It shows the layers that make up the ARENA concept. On top there is the business layer, beneath that the operational layer. ARENA integrates horizontally and vertically the business processes and their information technology. This is based on data from the operational processes and on data (orders) from the business processes. There is a continuous bi-directional flow of data between the layers.

Within the operational layer integration takes place between the so-called movement control areas. Examples of such areas are the gasoline blender, the mogas blender, the crude terminal, pipeline systems etc. Where all these control areas used to have their own piece of automation with their own type of order processing, now they all work with the same data from the same data warehouse.
Because of the operational nature, precautions are taken to ensure that in case of infrastructure or system failure each control area can continue to operate without loss of data.

This concept has been put into operation in 2003 and is currently being extended by adding more control areas under the ARENA umbrella. As a final note, the Invensys Off-sites modules used (OMM, TIS, BOSS, MAS) are the standard packages. Out of the box they can be configured to operate in such a complex environment.