Contribution of Production Support System to reinforce process resilience in the chemical industry

The chemical industry can be defined as a typical type of plant industry. As it is impossible to see inside of a plant directly, a system; PSS (Production Support System) that enables to monitor a process status with sensors is applied. Since it costs to implement PSS, a company checks the reasonability of the amount of investment from the viewpoints of resource saving, energy saving and man-power saving by estimation of effects provided by PSS. The company tends to rely on the manpower saving out of these three kinds of saving though such man-power saving causes a decline of total skills in a production process plant. This situation brings a risk of occurrence of many issues in the process plant. Actually, in the industry, the resilience of production process is worthy of notice as a capacity to restrain a lot of disruptive signals. The process resilience is generated by 1) Production plant personnel, 2) PSS, and 3) Production unit. It is necessary to prevent accidents and some troubles to execute the production activity. Especially the level of skills and knowledge of the production plant personnel are mostly concerned with the process resilience. If margin time can be produced due to PSS, it will be devoted to educating and training the production plant personnel. As a result, the process resilience will be reinforced.