Real-Time Equipment Monitoring and Asset Management in the AVEVA PI System
By Russell Herbert, Digital Innovation Director at ITI Group
Often, I’m asked by clients where is the best place to start focusing when wanting to do more with technology like the PI System.
Of course, there is rarely a simple and straightforward answer to this because every customer is different – but that said, as long as there is data flowing from a piece of machinery into PI, then doing anything around real-time equipment monitoring is often high up on my list of recommendations. Why? Well, for two main reasons really …
- Firstly, the benefits from developing such solutions can make a very tangible and often immediate improvement to way a plant is prioritising maintenance decisions and managing its valuable assets, so it’s a great way to see rapid value from PI and demonstrate this back to key stakeholders.
- The second reason is that equipment monitoring is a fantastic area where solutions can start small and relatively simple, perhaps with just a few screens and some simple trending of key performance indicators, but can quickly grow and develop as the skills and confidence of the engineer working with PI grows.
So, where is the best place to start?
An immediate first step is often performance KPIs which can be easily added to measured data by using PI Asset Framework, as can nice visual indicators to give a user a really quick and impactful overview of how a piece of equipment is performing or where issues might be developing.
Trending data on its own will forever be popular with engineers as it just gives them a historic visualisation of everything that’s been recorded from the machine, but often it can be hard to quickly look at these trends and get a quick accurate idea of what’s really happening. By using PI to calculate performance metrics, summary data, hourly/daily averages, highs, lows, rate of change etc, it’s possible to dramatically improve the information that the real time data can provide to operations and maintenance teams about the live condition of their equipment.
…I’ve worked with customers in the North Sea, such as Spirit Energy, who have reported that by simply introducing such improvements to the ways they were monitoring and presenting equipment they have seen significant percentage improvements to the daily production output from their assets – which is fantastic! Knowing that most of these improvements take only days to develop and deploy in PI should, in my opinion, put them very high in everyone’s list of important enhancements.
Moving on further from adding measured metrics and KPIs, the options really are limitless …
- Some users look for more advanced types of visualisation for their equipment data, such as perhaps showing an operating window in PI Vision highlighting where the equipment is operating now and how this has been changing over time.
- Other users enhance their solutions by adding some event-based monitoring which PI is really good at being able to handle for them.
- Displaying live equipment data within operating windows is a great way to further enhance the way equipment performance is presented to a user who can quickly get a feel if the machine is healthy or not by seeing where within the windows their equipment is currently running.
- Enhancing this further, it is very easy with PI to add more calculated values to the dashboard to help the operations team make the right decisions: Perhaps a key performance indicator has been slowly trending towards the boundary of a recommended operating window. With PI we can easily analyse that rate of change and calculate the time under current conditions with which the equipment will go outside of safe operating conditions, then this information can help an engineer prioritise their response.
…I’ve seen customers such as ENI and BP make great use of such operating window visualisations and have calculated metrics within their PI Vision displays – both of these customers have been on stage at events like PI World reporting the great value these things deliver.
- Take these concepts one step further and we can even use PI to monitor and capture historic totals around how equipment is being operated around operating windows. Every time a specific piece of equipment is operating outside of a window, PI can keep a record of the duration and impact of that event, and over time these can be brought together by PI to give maintenance teams a quick overview of the time spent outside of recommended operation.
…I’ve seen clients like MOL in Hungary use these types of historic records in PI to guide decisions during plant workovers, where they use this calculated data to decide whether certain pieces of equipment, such as their heat exchangers prone to high temperature corrosion issues, need to be replaced to ensure their continued safe operation.
- With the use of PI Event Frames, engineers can define operational rules that relate to real-time information coming from a machine, and those events can be configured to respond in a multitude of ways depending on the type of event. Some events might trigger the automatic sending of an email notification, others might alert a control room to changing conditions or could even trigger a process to collect data together relating to the event and send it on to an advanced analytics tool for further investigation. Even the addition of a few PI Event frames that can proactively monitor equipment and automatically respond when a machine is demonstrating certain behaviour that an engineer is especially interested in can quickly deliver significant benefits: ensuring things are running as they should; avoiding costly running mistakes; and quickly spotting and resolving safety issues.
Introducing external data sources and management systems
The final step I’ll mention here is about connecting PI to external data sources that can also help engineers make decisions in real time around the correct way to maintain pieces of equipment. Running all equipment under a simple time-based maintenance philosophy can be fine but often there can be great improvements made just by introducing a bit of real-time monitoring and interactions with a Maintenance Management System. Take for example a situation where an engineer wants to shift from sending a maintenance team out to the field every 3 months to one that considers the actual running hours since the machine was last maintained. By using PI Asset Framework we can configure PI to connect to a Maintenance System such as IBM Maximo and have vital information, such as last maintenance date for the equipment, brought back into PI. Once we have this information, it’s easy for PI to calculate the actual running hours since that last maintenance date and automatically trigger guidance to a maintenance supervisor as the data changes. PI could monitor those running hours, calculate the daily rate of change and then send a notification when perhaps the machine is a calendar week away from hitting some threshold.
These thoughts only start to touch on the possibilities available for improving equipment monitoring with the PI System, but hopefully they’ve provided some immediate ideas and thoughts about how such improvements could benefit your own organisation. If you would like to discuss these ideas or anything further around how real-time data can further enhance your operations and deliver quick tangible value please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to discuss more.
About Russell Herbert
Russell Herbert is a highly accomplished digital technology strategist and industrial consultant with 30 years’ experience in the Oil & Gas, Energy Transition, Hi-Tech, and Defence industries. He regularly presents his industry knowledge at international digital events, using his expertise in real-time operations, industrial information management and advanced analytics, to help global corporations make best use of technology to dramatically enhance their operations.
After working as one of OSIsoft/AVEVA’s Industry Principals for 9 years, Russell joined ITI Group in March 2024 to help lead our Digital strategy and directly support ITI’s customers.
About ITI Group
ITI Group develops and integrates digital transformation solutions for Energy, Nuclear and Industrial manufacturing sectors, from strategically placed offices in Sheffield, Aberdeen, Saltaire, Glasgow, Alcester, Whitehaven and North America, from which to best serve our clients. We advance safe, secure and sustainable operations through the innovative use of technology.
For more information on how ITI Group’s asset management and maintenance solutions and services could help you, contact us on enquiries@itigroup.com.