Modular Approaches to Automation and Production

Most process plants and facilities are a product of their evolution. For example, many refineries in the United States were originally constructed in the early 1900s and have evolved over a period of over 100 years. These facilities were modernized, expanded, and modernized again to adapt to generational changes in technology, both for production and control. Facilities evolved to be monolithic, and highly customized from an engineering standpoint. Automation systems and their design and engineering evolved to be the same way – monolithic, proprietary, and relying on a large amount of customization and custom engineering.

These proprietary, monolithic, highly engineered approaches present burdens that end users are increasingly finding unacceptable. Historically, automation projects are rarely completed on time and are usually over budget. At the same time, projects are getting larger and more complex. Even in today's tough economic climate, record-breaking facilities are being built and commissioned, from the massive Sadara chemical project in Saud Arabia (a joint venture between Dow and Saudi Aramco), to the Shell Prelude floating LNG ship. These larger, highly complex projects are hard to manage. There is a lot of money on the line. While automation has historically been a barrier to on-time project completion, this is no longer acceptable.

End users have expressed their displeasure at the way automation systems have evolved. ExxonMobil, for example, recently announced its vision for an open automation system of the future that is more flexible and easier to deploy and maintain. Users have made it clear that they want a different approach to automation – one that removes the many complex layers that have built up over several decades of changing technology. They want a solution built on modular, standardized elements that can be easily integrated together.

These changes in automation systems are reflected in the changing nature of the plants themselves, which are becoming more modular and flexible. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, there is a push toward more open, modular plant construction. Instead of building a large, monolithic plant just to produce one drug, for example, pharmaceutical companies are opting for modular plants that can be configured to produce multiple drugs – ones that can be scaled up or down to increase or decrease capacity as market demands change. Modular plants also take less time to construct and can ease the process of meeting regulatory approvals.

Table of Contents

• Executive Overview
• What Is Modularization?
• End User Vision for Modular, Open Systems
• Standards and Modularization
• Recommendations

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Keywords: Process Plants, Refineries, Automation Systems, Manufacturing, Prefabricated Modular Units, ARC Advisory Group.