Best practices for effective application of discrete event simulation in the process industries

The application of discrete event simulation in the process industries is commonly used for the analysis of reliability and maintenance improvements. However there have been increasing applications that go beyond this traditional area of application to include evaluations for chemical plant expansions, capital investment options, cycle time reduction and safety, in presence of failure prone components. This paper will present three case studies to demonstrate the use of discrete event simulation for such applications. The first case study demonstrates the use of discrete event simulation to identify critical failure modes for a plant characterized by discrete and continuous product flow. The second study involves the evaluation of capital expansion decisions in presence of different failures and identification of critical components affecting plant throughput. The third case study shows the use of simulation of verify the designed production capacity of a subsystem in presence of different failures and operational constraints. The goal of this paper is to show the potential of discrete event simulation for such problems, and to present examples of best practices for the scoping and execution of simulation projects in the process industries.