Plant interaction hotspot tool

ExperTune’s PlantTriage software now includes a tool that graphically highlights plant interactions. Using the Interaction Hot Spots tool, engineers can quickly pinpoint the root cause of process interactions. Engineers can resolve these upsets to improve quality, energy, production rate and process uptime.

The browser-based Interaction Hot Spots tool is now included with PlantTriage, a control loop monitor. PlantTriage monitors all plant control loops and instruments in real time. Interactions between control loops appear as coloured blocks on the Interaction Hot Spots display. Stronger interactions are indicated by stronger colours. Following PlantTriage’s intuitive colour scheme, green indicates no interaction, yellow indicates some interaction and red indicates strong interaction. On a single web page, users can see all of the significant interactions in the entire plant.

The Hot Spots display is also interactive. Using a slider, users can filter the display to show only the most significant interactions. Simple drop-down menus allow the user to narrow the scope of an effort and focus, for example, on just a few unit operations.

Users can click on a graphical hot spot to start a detailed investigation. This launches a context-sensitive drill-down into the relevant data from the interacting loops. This includes display of real-time process variable trends and a process interaction map. Using this information, users can establish the root cause of interaction problems in a matter of minutes.

The Interaction Hot Spots tool is available as a standard feature in PlantTriage.