HISS - Human Interface Supervision System
Automation within the oil and gas industry is highly developed and unmanned production plants are common practice. However, to ensure continuously safe working processes and safe technical systems human experiences gained over a long time are still required. Based on these experiences and human knowledge a wide range of activities is initiated, encompassing controls, routine maintenance, preventive maintenance, risk maintenance and security measures. But is this really a professional basis for best practices, cost optimisation and risk assessment? Is it a guarantee of a justified technical integrity? And what will happen if human experiences do not exist, due to the rapid changes our industry is faced with? The answer is HISS – Human Interface Supervision System, a new intelligent electronic system which will be one of the "world-wide projects” at the Expo in Hanover.
What does HISS mean? Some years ago the vision was to have a continuously working control system at one's disposal which is able to hear, to see and to smell with an intensity like humans and even top human abilities. A strategy was set up to investigate the technical feasibility and economic materialisation. The aim of the new electronic system is to take over part of the role of humans, and to come up with justified programs due to environmental, safety and security requirements and with a new professional maintenance philosophy. Routine maintenance, preventive maintenance and risk maintenance are activities derived from the HISS logic.
The maintenance of plants and systems has continued to develop in a positive way in the last few years and has moved from the former "fault repair mentality" to a "fault prevention strategy". Even in this first step the mistakes of the past become more than clear, for only when the knowledge gained from the plants and systems has been systematically evaluated (life cycle analysis) and transformed into appropriately adapted maintenance philosophies can a technically balanced procedure be expected. This includes a computer-aided evaluation of status plans, inspection reports, repair and maintenance records and other relevant reports, as only with the help of practice-oriented assessment philosophies and the algorithms and status categories derived therefrom can a status catalogue be drawn up for all major components of a production system. This historical event and failure information is necessary in order that the parameters influencing failures can be analytically quantified therefrom and risk assessments with regard to safety, environment and assets can be made. This creates the basis for a condition and risk-based maintenance which ensures that maintenance work is carried out in good time before system failure, improves the technical integrity and increases availability.
Maintaining of technical integrity is not only a question of safety and environmental protection, but should also ensure the economic benefit of a production system in the long term by means of the highest possible availability. However, this availability, which is largely oriented towards safety and the environment, must remain payable and may not result in competition disadvantages. For this reason technical integrity and cost optimisation may not contradict each other. The solution lies in a sound technical and economic risk assessment of fault possibilities together with a catalogue of the necessary measures arranged in order of priority. But despite all progress made so far there remains the dependence on the assessment of individual experts with a relatively broad scope for interpretation when deciding on maintenance work and assessing the residual risk.
A suitable solution is the HISS system being developed and tested by BEB. With its properties SEEING, HEARING, SMELLING derived from human perception this opens up a new dimension for the use of expert systems. It will not only make a sustainable change to the maintenance function, but will also have a considerable impact on the operations function. For the duties of the outdoor operators, for example:
Plant protection by means of regular, but discontinuous visits Identification of changed situations using the sense organs EYES, EARS, NOSE Analysis of whether nuisance to neighbours really is caused by the plant in question or by third parties "Maintaining technical integrity” will remain an incomprehensible quantity for non-specialists as long as no statements concerning the existing risk can be made. For only in this way can one appear in public. If it is desired to compare the individual risk with previous safety measures, a further reduction in residual risk can be accepted.
Among the general public the probability of occurrence of an incident has been calculated as being between 10-7 and 10-6 per year for an acceptable risk, i.e. one inadmissible incident per million incidents. With incidents restricted to the plant sector a higher probability of 10-5 is assumed. However, all companies aspire to achieve better figures with a practicable effort, and HISS supports this aspiration fully and without interruptions. Also the unidentified risk of injuries to personnel working in the plant is reduced, as the appropriate characteristics can be included in the monitoring. The use of HISS will increase the technical availability of plants, enable a verification of and improve technical integrity, simplify the whole of the administrative process and release considerable cost saving potential. However, organisational adjustments must also be made, the timing of which must fit exactly into the change process.
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