A deep learning-based robust optimization approach for refinery planning under uncertainty

Refinery 4.0, a Review of the Main Challenges of the Industry 4.0 Paradigm in Oil & Gas Downstream

Industry 4.0 concept has become a worldwide revolution that has been mainly led by the manufacturing sector. Continuous Process Industry is part of this global trend where there are aspects of the "fourth industrial revolution" that must be adapted to the particular context and needs of big continuous processes such as oil refineries that have evolved to control paradigms supported by sector-specific technologies where big volumes of operation-driven data are continuously captured from a plethora of sensors. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence techniques can overcome the current limitations of Advanced Control Systems (mainly MPCs) by providing better performance on highly non-linear and complex systems and by operating with a broader scope in terms of signals/data and sub-systems. Moreover, the state of the art of traditional PID/MPC based solutions is showing an asymptotic improvement that requires a disruptive approach in order to reach relevant improvements in terms of efficiency, optimization, maintenance, etc. This paper shows the key aspects in oil refineries to successfully adopt Big Data and Machine Learning solutions that can significantly improve the efficiency and competitiveness of continuous processes.

Enhanced Soft Sensor with Qualified Augmented Samples for Quality Prediction of the Polyethylene Process

Data-driven soft sensors have increasingly been applied for the quality measurement of industrial polymerization processes in recent years. However, owing to the costly assay process, the limited labeled data available still pose significant obstacles to the construction of accurate models. In this study, a novel soft sensor named the selective Wasserstein generative adversarial network, with gradient penalty-based support vector regression (SWGAN-SVR), is proposed to enhance quality prediction with limited training samples. Specifically, the Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) is employed to capture the distribution of the available limited labeled data and to generate virtual candidates. Subsequently, an effective data-selection strategy is developed to alleviate the problem of varied-quality samples caused by the unstable training of the WGAN-GP. The selection strategy includes two parts: the centroid metric criterion and the statistical characteristic criterion. An SVR model is constructed based on the qualified augmented training data to evaluate the prediction performance. The superiority of SWGAN-SVR is demonstrated, using a numerical example and an industrial polyethylene process.