Estimation of Revenue Loss due to Disturbances on Utilities in the Process Industry

In English Disturbances on utilities, such as steam and cooling water, often cause large economic losses at industrial sites. Utilities are often shared between production areas, and a disturbance on a utility is therefore likely to affect a large part of the production site. In addition, production areas are often coupled by the product at the site. Obtaining a dynamic model of a site, with respect to utilities, is therefore both hard and time-consuming. In this paper, a method for quickly obtaining an estimate of the revenue losses different utilities cause is presented. The method uses a simple modeling approach, where the production areas at the site are modeled as either operating or not operating, i.e. on/off. The strength of this method is that utilities can be ordered to the revenue loss they cause with very little modeling effort. The method is applied to an industrial site at Perstorp AB.