Formal Representation of Meta-Operation of Chemical Plants

The synthesis of standard operating procedures (SOPs) of production and manufacturing plants is a complex process, which requires time and effort by process experts to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the target operating procedures. This research paper proposes a formal approach to structure and represent SOPs, which are used as a base to develop an automated operation management solution. Stimulated from the formal methods, and to overcome the complexity of plant operation, the concept of meta-operation is introduced as a set of generic operation libraries, which is used to simplify the definition of complex operation and to validate SOP. SOP formal language (SOPFL) is proposed to represent SOP as well as meta-operations in English-like formal statements, which includes vocabulary and rules. A SOPFL-based editor and parser are developed to automatically synthesize and validate the syntax and semantics of SOP for production plants. The proposed solution is used to synthesize SOPs and meta-operations of different case studies from batch and oil and gas plant processes.