Refinery wide inventory management solution

Consistency and accuracy in the refinery inventory information is key to optimal planning and scheduling and for oil loss management.
To achieve this, the basic measurements, such as the tank-level measurements and the custody transfer measurement have to be in place.
Beyond these measurements, information validation and management need to be in place to ensure that the available information, and particularly the combination is consistent. This is provided through the basic functionality of the Tank Information Software and the Order Movement Manager software (including the tank quality and composition tracking functionality).
In addition it is required that the available information is easily accessible for the whole application environment of the refinery, and as such the Refinery Inventory Management provides a data warehouse for the refinery.

Tank Inventory Software (TIS)

A wide variety of tanks are installed at refineries and Invensys provides the capability through TIS to calculate real-time the inventory for every tank independent of the measurement device applied. The key features of TIS are:

• Scanning of field equipment values
• Manage tank limit data and perform basic alarm functions
• Volume (strapping), flow rate and weight calculations
• Provide time to limits information
• Perform inventory calculations
• Performance emission calculations
• Manage tank quality and /or composition information

Product movement and delivery management

The Order Movement Management package (OMM) keeps track of material movement within the refinery. Orders, received from planning are entered in OMM either manually or electronically. OMM assists the operator during the execution of the orders. It collects and stores information about the products and quantities moved.
The key features of OMM are:

• User-friendly operator interface with many security, filtering and selection options that allow entering, modifying, monitoring and validating movements.
• Calculation of volume moved, estimated time to completion and estimated time of completion of both order and movements
• Movement condition monitoring (start, stop and alarm conditions)
• Interfaces with the DCS to collect process data.
• Interface with TIS to maintain tank status
• Interfaces to the data warehouse, which is providing the information exchange to all other refinery application such as planning / scheduling, yield accounting and ERP packages.

Movement and Inventory data warehouse

As mentioned above the Invensys Inventory Monitoring and Management solution provides a data warehouse for all the refinery applications. In order to provide a secure and reliable information environment, Invensys has defined the available information into two domains, the operational domain and the reference domain, each with its own security / access procedures and its own definition of information ownership.

In this ways, integrity of information is assured. In addition Invensys has applied the standard feature of data replication to create physical separation of information between operational level and the business level while the information consistency remains.
This set-up ensures also very low cost of ownership for the overall IT infrastructure.

Conclusions

Based on the many Inventory Monitoring and Management projects Invensys has carried out, it has learned that these applications are not control applications, nor IT applications. It bridges the real-time movement control and the business layer with applications like planning and scheduling and ERP. By combining re-usable application solutions, such as TIS , OMM and MAS, with the concept of data warehouse, Invensys can provide the refineries with costs effective information solutions which enable not only the applications of Invensys, but also all other applications used on the refinery.