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Sinopec, a leading integrated oil and chemical company in China, introduced advanced process control (APC) and real-time (online) optimization (RTO) applications in the country in the early 1990s. Working with Setpoint (acquired by AspenTech in 1996), Sinopec pioneered China’s first APC/RTO pilot project in a catalytic cracking unit. The results were encouraging, with significant economic returns.
This pilot project helped Sinopec begin to understand the potential value that APC and RTO solutions could provide and the company initiated additional pilots for these types of solutions in a variety of different units in other plants. Working largely with strategic partners, Honeywell and AspenTech, Sinopec implemented hundreds of APC and RTO projects in the years that immediately followed.
Based on Sinopec’s initial success, from about 1996 through 2004, other process industries in China began to implement these types of advanced technologies, resulting in a number of large-scale APC and RTO implementations. But this changed abruptly starting around 2005, when process industry end users in China began to question whether these solutions were actually meeting their expectations.
Sinopec, for example, performed an internal survey that showed that only about one-third of its installed APC and RTO solutions were performing well, one-third were barely satisfactory, and the final one-third were either performing poorly or had been abandoned. Reasons included lack of adequate attention from management, poor implementation quality, lack of adequate maintenance, lack of enough valid field data, not enough qualified technical resources, etc.
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Keywords: Advanced Process Control, Online Optimization, China, Process Industries, ARC Advisory Group.