A new approach to production regularity assessment in the oil and chemical industries

This article presents a new approach to production regularity assessment in the oil and chemical industries. The production regularity is measured by the throughput capacity distribution. A brief survey of some existing techniques is presented, and the structure of the new approach is introduced. The proposed approach is based on analytical methods, i.e. no simulation is necessary. The system modeling is split into three levels: components, basic subsystems, and merged subsystems, and two modeling methods are utilized: Markov modeling and a rule-based method. The main features of the approach are as follows: (1) short calculation time; (2) systems of dependent components can be modeled; (3) maintenance strategies can be modeled; and (4) a variety of system configurations can be modeled. A simple case study is used to demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied.