AM-00-44 Planning, Scheduling and Control Systems: Why Can’t They Work Together?

Description:

The decisions made by the production planning, scheduling, and control business functions have a large economic impact on refining industry operations - with the difference between best practice and lower quartile performance estimated to be worth as much as one dollar per barrel of crude feed. The current refining industry environment and outside economic pressures place even more of a premium on effective execution of these functions. In spite of the incentives, or maybe because of them, there exists significant disagreement about the proper organization and integration of these functions, indeed even which decisions are properly considered by the planning, scheduling or control business processes. Advances in data capture and conditioning, sophisticated analytical techniques, and high performance computing environments have provided improved technology support for all three functions. Highspeed communications can transfer information and data almost without limits. Yet, maintaining consistency among the decisions in most refining companies continues to be difficult and the lack of consistency has real economic consequences. In this paper, we examine the following questions: What are the key issues, similarities, and differences for these functions in support of refining industry decision making? How do leading refining companies solve these problems today? What are the roadblocks in achieving the integration that seems technically feasible? The answers have significant financial implications as well as implications with regard to technology selection, infrastructure design, and staffing requirements.