Aspen Technology Begins Journey Toward the Self-Optimizing Plant

Aspen Technology, Inc. announced the new release of Aspen Unified to deliver the next generation of production optimization solutions that will help transform business processes for the world’s refineries.  The Aspen Unified solution brings planning and scheduling together in one environment to connect and automate isolated processes, maximize the yield of high value products, push closer to limits and drive improved margins.

Through a unified and visually intuitive flowsheet interface, a refinery’s planning and operations teams can easily build and sustain models as well as gain a more accurate view of current performance and plant constraints.  The Aspen Unified solution is built to reduce margin leakage across the different operational silos and to improve consistency in modelling data between planning and scheduling.  With AspenTech’s optimization technology—Aspen GDOT—Aspen Unified aligns plant operations with economic conditions to achieve production optimization in real time.  Aspen Unified helps operations to better achieve the goals of the refinery, including safety and environmental targets, as well as financial and production KPIs.  Aspen Unified is the first step in realizing the vision for the Self-Optimizing Plant.

The Self-Optimizing Plant

AspenTech defines the Self-Optimizing Plant as a facility that can automatically respond to changing operating conditions.  AspenTech is creating industrial applications that can bridge functional silos and adapt to maintain the high levels of efficiency semi-autonomously.  A refinery (or refineries in the case of Aspen Unified PIMS with Multisite option) that implements Aspen Unified to align planning and scheduling and with closed-loop automation systems, such as advanced process control (APC) and dynamic optimization, can begin to drive higher efficiency from its operations. They will become more capable, more agile, more flexible, safer and more profitable, under all market conditions.

Peter Reynolds, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “The Aspen Unified solution with updated software and support for consistent data models could help industrial companies simplify workflows.  By improving collaboration and breaking down silos between Planning, Scheduling and, Operations, companies have the potential to create higher-value work processes and improve margins.”