Yokogawa Solution Service Corporation and Cisco Systems G.K. announce that they will provide a new solution for oil refineries that makes use of their respective information and industrial automation technologies. This platform integrates production, quality, progress control, and other information technologies with the control systems that are used to monitor and control production processes in real time, ensuring that facilities can be efficiently rebuilt and modified. It also improves the efficiency of corporate management by making it easier for information to be accessed by information management systems.
As a result of a review of Japanese national energy policy, a new law known as the Sophisticated Methods of Energy Supply Structures Act was passed that requires the oil industry to make more efficient utilization of fossil fuels. To accomplish this, oil refining companies are now consolidating their refinery operations, as part of which they must also reestablish and reconfigure their control and information systems. This requires an environment where control, MES, and ERP systems can be quickly built or reconfigured, and where various types of complex data can be accessed in an integrated and flexible manner at each system level.
The solution improves efficiency by structuring and standardizing a plant's control and information systems as well as the data handled by these respective systems. This improves the portability of data, establishes a framework that facilitates the integration, construction, and modification of all of a plant's control and information systems, and creates an environment with industry-leading security for all communications and information management. This is true not only for a plant's own control and information systems, but also for links between plants. In addition to facilitating the consolidation of a company's refinery operations, this solution is useful in the installation and expansion of plant facilities, and can deliver the same benefits here as well. The main features of this solution are as follows.
- Integrated information reporting
- Information access
- Analysis (business intelligence)