Central control rooms and petrochemical plants: costs and benefits

Petrochemical plants are increasingly faced with the need to upgrade their control centers to support the installation of more advanced control systems and to better protect operations personnel in the event of catastrophe. Plants often take advantage of this opportunity to consolidate existing control rooms into a central facility, in a hope of improving plant-wide communications, increasing operating efficiency, and reducing construction costs. In this paper, we describe some of the key issues that must be considered in analyzing the benefits and costs of a central control facility, using operational experiences and case histories from a variety of plants