A novel design for the production process using ontology and business rules

In production plants, processes and emergency shutdowns are not straightforward tasks, due to the large amount of events and alarms which occur during the plant shutdown process. It is vitally important to be able to identify remotely the causes and effects of plant shutdown in the production process. This paper presents a novel framework for monitoring a production process using an ontology and process business rules, allowing domain expert to define and modify the plant structure, and associated business rules. The proposed framework is based on the standard automation plant safety technique Unit Control Logic (UCL). The development framework is generic therefore, it can be applied to any automation production plant. The framework is designed and implemented using an oil field production company as a case study and the results were found to be satisfactory.