SMART PLANTS 1

Five steps to becoming a

fully-realised smart plant
In pursuit of Industry 4.0, more and more companies are gearing up to transform their
plants into smart plants. Smart plants combine physical processes, digital technologies,
machine learning and big data to create an optimally efficient and profitable system. While
transforming a facility into a smart plant is a complex process, this transformation can
easily be achieved with the right approach.
n by Martin Provencher, OSIsoft, USA

S mart plant technology has the power

to transform every aspect of an
industry. It can improve communications
Industry 4.0: the digital transformation journey

for remote monitoring, support health and

safety goals, improve energy efficiency,
and increase asset reliability – all of which
lead to smoother operations, lower costs
and higher profits.
Many companies struggle to see a big-
picture view of their plant because a plant
is not a single system – it is many different
assets and machines. Often these assets
have different control systems, from PLC
to SCADA and more, operating completely
independently of each other. For a plant
to function as a whole, integrated system,
all assets must first feed their data into
a single real-time operational data
structure, such as the PI System. Once the
operational data has been collected, there
are five vital steps that a company must
follow to unleash the power of this data
and transform the plant into an Industry
4.0-ready smart plant.
Step 1: protect assets
Once all of the company’s data is available
in a single place, operations staff,
engineers and managers can identify
trends in real time to visualise what is truly
happening in the plant. These trends will
allow individuals and teams to identify
abnormal situations and act on them to
protect people, equipment and profit.
Right from step one, this top-down view
can save a company a tremendous amount
in damages and profit loss.
Step 2: monitor performance
Now that a company has identified
various operational trends in the data,
this real-time data can be compared to a
performance baseline. A baseline can be
the expected performance of a machine
according to its operations manual or
data from previous years. This baseline
comparison can help engineers identify
KPIs and create reports that reflect
how the plant is performing relative to
expectations, and whether or not the plant
is meeting its goals.
Step 3: diagnose problems
Next, the company can examine
operational data to identify the conditions
that often result in failure or process
deviations. When reliability and process
engineers analyse these conditions, they
can start to understand why failures occur.
They can begin to monitor asset conditions
in real-time to spot deviations that might
indicate an approaching failure. It is at this
stage that companies start to see a huge
return on investment by avoiding serious
problems before they even happen. This
is also an important time to invest in data
visualisation tools such as PI Vision to
assist in this real-time analysis.
Step 4: predict future anomalies
Now that the company can see what is
happening in real-time, engineers can
begin to predict future anomalies. First,
all the data available must be modelled
and analysed: equipment data, process
data, energy consumption, maintenance
status, staff availability and even weather
data. Analysing and modelling data can
help create predictions about future
issues like equipment failures, process or
environmental deviations, and more. At
this stage, staff are no longer performing
the analysis – analytical tools can use
historical failure data to create models that
predict future problems.
However, for these predictions about
equipment failure or other production
anomalies to be accurate, the operational
data feeding these analytical tools must be
put into context. For example, sensor data
can only be truly valuable when it is tied
to a particular asset in a particular plant.
Asset Framework, the contextualisation
layer of the PI System, can provide just this
sort of valuable context to a plant’s data.

© TRADESHIP PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2020 DECEMBER 2020 INTERNATIONAL CEMENT REVIEW

 2 SMART PLANTS
Step 5: prescribe with machine
learning
With a robust real-time data infrastructure
and a full understanding of the conditions
for success or failure for the plant as a
whole, it is time to implement an AI or
machine learning solution. Implementing
machine learning is where a plant
truly becomes smart. An AI or machine
learning model can consider the entire
picture: equipment data, financial goals
and information, parts availability, team
availability, weather conditions and more.
AI and machine learning algorithms can
then determine the best course of action
to manage risks and optimise productivity
outcomes.
For example, imagine a mining truck
is approaching its predicted maintenance
period. The data confirms that the truck
is ready for maintenance, but the staff or
parts are not available to begin repairs.
The AI can determine how many more
days the truck can safely run and schedule
a maintenance overhaul to coincide with
parts and staff availability, keeping a plant
productive while ensuring safety and
reducing downtime.
Cemex leads the way
Few companies have demonstrated the
tremendous value of creating a smart
plant using this five-step process more
than Cemex. The company began its
journey towards becoming a smart plant
with a decade of valuable data waiting
to be analysed. It digitised operations
by installing equipment sensors and
PI System technology in every facility,
creating a stream of valuable real-time
data. “Data is the new gold. We had a
gold mine sitting there and we were not
tapping it,” said Rodrigo Javier Quintero,
operations digital technologies manager at
Cemex, during the PI World San Francisco
conference in 2019.
Cemex first tested the PI system on
its rotary kiln. The kiln sits at the heart of
Figure 1: phased development
INTERNATIONAL CEMENT REVIEW DECEMBER 2020
“Data is the new gold. We
had a gold mine sitting
there and we were not
tapping it.”
Rodrigo Javier Quintero,
operations digital
technologies manager, Cemex
Cemex’s cement production process and
is one of its most vital assets. This piece
of equipment is responsible for product
quality and output but requires a massive
amount of energy to operate. As a vital
but resource-heavy asset, the kiln was
the natural starting point for deploying
AI-driven optimisation technologies.
To start, Cemex isolated a small portion
– the clinker cooling process – as a target
for automation. “This is not a 100m dash.
This is a marathon,” Mr Quintero noted.
During the clinker cooling process, cold
air is pushed into the kiln while heat from
the raw material is recouped for process
efficiency. To optimise heat recovery,
Cemex operators must control the air input
cooling rates, all while ensuring process
stability and product quality. Though
Cemex operators are highly skilled, it is
impossible to have the most-experienced
team members available every day.
Taking a phased approach, Cemex
opted to feed AI-driven recommendations
directly into the kiln control system via the
PI System to help all operators achieve
“golden run” capabilities. The company
partnered with Petuum, an AI solution
developer, for this project.
From predictive to prescriptive
To test the possibility of achieving
“golden run” status, Petuum and Cemex
developed a “predict, prescribe, autosteer”
plan. During the prediction phase,
Petuum’s self-learning
software analysed past
performance data to
create output variables
that would predict cooler
behaviour. Operators
were then able to visualise
projected behaviour in
PI Vision alongside real-
time performance data.
“This was eye-opening
for the kiln operators,”
said Mr Quintero. “For
the first time, operators were able to see
how their process was behaving and how
the AI model was telling them the system
was going to behave up to 25mins ahead
of time.”
Cemex opted to predict cooling
performance within a 5-15min range to
increase accuracy while giving operators
time to react to projections.
Next, Cemex moved from a predictive
to a prescriptive strategy. After organising
the data in Asset Framework, operators
used PI Vision to visualise a range of
settings recommendations based on prior
performance. During this phase, Cemex
relied heavily on operator expertise,
allowing operators to offer direct feedback
and fine-tune the AI-recommended
settings before deployment. Once it
became clear that settings were on track, it
was time to move to stage three: autopilot.
Cooling on autopilot
Having established confidence in the
AI-recommended settings, Cemex
deployed autopilot. Cemex modified
the OPC interface to accept PI System
information. In conjunction with operator
oversight, Petuum’s AI algorithms
work together with PI System data
and the OPC interface to predict future
kiln performance. Those predictions
automatically feed proposed settings into
the control system to optimise the cooling
process, promote energy efficiency and
predict equipment failures – all while
maintaining quality standards. When
autopilot is running, Cemex expects to
improve energy usage by 2-7 per cent,
reduce process variability by half of the
standard deviation and increase overall
yield by five per cent.
Cemex unified its data into a single
real-time operational data management
system, focussing on its most vital
assets. The company then monitored
performance and diagnosed issues in the
clinker cooling process, before moving
forward to predicting future anomalies and
using AI technology to prescribe automatic
settings for the kiln.
By following these five steps, Cemex has
started down the path toward automating
processes and achieving previously
impossible production goals with the help
of Petuum and OSIsoft’s PI System. Since
Cemex already relies on the PI System in a
number of its locations, the company now
plans to deploy AI technology alongside
the PI System at plants in Europe and
South America. n