Improve Your Operational Planning & Commercial Performance with Beyond Limits LUMINAI Refinery Advisor

Beyond Limits recently announced the General Availability of a flagship product, LUMINAI Refinery Advisor – an AI for refinery cloud-based decision support software product that advises your operators on how to realize optimal refinery plans, guiding them to hit production planning targets while improving refinery operational and start-up dependability. Empower your operators to close the profitability gap in real-time, maximize efficiency, and operate closer to plan with this artificial intelligence-driven solution that captures the full refinery margin by upholding a holistic view of an entire site and making timely, transparent, and explainable recommendations.

TAKE A DEEPER DIVE INTO HOW THE REFINERY ADVISOR WORKS BY READING OUR PRODUCT SHEET HERE.

Address Your Refinery’s Most Critical Optimization, Operations & Profitability Challenges

Seeing as refinery profitability is constantly at risk, margins are tight, decision-making is complex, and variability is a challenge to current processes – reaching or exceeding optimization goals requires a uniform application of best practices and unique human expertise to achieve planning objectives. While closed-loop control systems have been effective tools for applying and attaining refinery optimization targets, a breach between plan objectives and actual performance results remains an issue.

Aligning production strategies and operational realities of complex refineries with financial goals is just one major issue; other challenging factors include:

+ Loss of long-standing operator and domain expert knowledge and experience as professionals increasingly retire out of the workforce.

+ Crude weight plus quality variability, resulting in process hurdles such as constrained systems, bottlenecks, and more.

+Siloed communications create a struggle for operations teams to connect effectively and efficiently, resulting in delayed escalation and time-to-decision for remediation tactics.

+Inadequate operator support for the immediate need/ability to take manual control.

“Only 40 percent of refiners delivered above-average returns over the past 10 years and 31 percent of the companies were negatively disrupted.” (Deloitte Insights)

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW THE ADVISOR OVERCOMES CHALLENGES FACED BY REFINERIES – CHECK OUT OUR CASE STUDY HERE. 

The Essential Advisor for Humans in the Loop

Make every operator your best operator by implementing AI that combines engineering knowledge and experience with real-time process data to advise them on how to best achieve refinery plans through human-readable, auditable recommendations. To facilitate closing the gap and recouping revenue, LUMINAI Refinery Advisor is designed to accelerate how humans in the loop identify off-plan behavior and make fast, accurate, consistent, and confident remediation decisions when control systems cannot.

This advanced artificial intelligence software optimizes many different, often changing, constraints. Designed to think like an engineer and provide expert guidance to solve problems across the entire refinery, the Refinery Advisor works with (and goes beyond) traditional automation-focused methods to ensure process objectives are always met.

“The addition of a symbolic AI approach, layered on top of conventional artificial intelligence methods, has been an invaluable technological advancement. Capturing and encoding domain knowledge, expertise, and best practices vastly reduces the amount of data necessary for AI applications to function effectively. The explainability factor that comes along with this approach establishes trust in the technology which has been invaluable for accelerating user adoption and configuration – as compared to long model training requirements for solutions that employ machine learning alone.” (Michael Krause, Senior Manager of AI Solutions)

Streamline Communication & Preserve Valuable Knowledge

This landmark AI solution helps your refinery commercial, engineering, and operations teams communicate more effectively across silos to make timely judgments that remediate risks regarding throughput, quality, reliability and profitability, resulting in a more resourceful approach to returning processes to desired performance ranges. When it comes to determining how to best optimize your refinery to meet ever-changing commercial plans, LUMINAI Refinery Advisor is the key to removing communication barriers between commercial, engineering, and operations teams.

 Another concerning factor involves the quickly declining number of experienced individuals in the sector’s workforce. Years of proficiency and essential knowledge threaten to be lost as more and more professionals approach retirement, ready to move on to that next step in their lives and taking with them decades-worth of knowledge too valuable to become lost to the passage of time. 

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), a global industry organization, found that nearly 54% of its members are over 55 years old. 44% of Generation Y and 62% of Generation Z say a career in oil and gas is unappealing. (EY Global)

However, LUMINAI Refinery Advisor works to bridge the knowledge-loss gap as well by capturing and encoding veteran operator knowledge and then distributing essential expertise, best practices, and business logic across an entire organization so that it’s never lost and easily transferrable to less experienced, up-and-coming professionals. The Refinery Advisor grants users the ability to digitize how they plan, operate, and improve process operations while also easily readable, configurable, extensible, and maintainable by engineering and operations staff, requiring minimal to no guidance from data specialists.

Work with & Surpass APC Capabilities

Users have found that the LUMINAI Refinery Advisor actually fills a gap that Advanced Process Control (APC) systems do not cover – and that the two systems are complementary. APC can compensate well for changes in the system on which it’s trained, but an operator can respond to an infinitely larger set of optimization challenges. They found that their objectives and constraints were changing frequently as they tried to keep up with shifting market conditions and as equipment degraded or was modified.

In many cases for the operator to optimize the process, they need to turn the APC off and take manual control. This is especially true during start-up conditions before the refinery has reached a steady state. Rather than requiring the process engineer to look over their shoulder, if they were even available, the Refinery Advisor will give them explicit instructions of how to operate outside of the norm but still within safe operating parameters to meet operational goals and drive more profit.

Accelerate Digital Transformation & Drive Operational Consistency Across the Enterprise

As a no-code artificial intelligence solution that facilitates rapid operator adoption and easy-to-use functionality, the Refinery Advisor is a more economical option than other solutions and a fraction of the typical cost of other refinery-wide optimization software products. The Advisor grows your crude selection opportunities and enables operations teams to optimize across highly varying campaign feedstocks, giving your teams the ability to steadily meet profitability plans using intuitive support and explicit instructions.

Unlike standard static guidance, the Refinery Advisor determines an operation’s constraints through real-time sensor values from plant historians, advises corrective actions for operators to optimize up to constraints, and enhances desired target prioritization capabilities to maximize profitability. The Refinery Advisor also provides a straightforward, transparent environment to connect engineer and operator workflows for improved communication and collaboration.

TAKE A DEEPER DIVE INTO HOW THE REFINERY ADVISOR WORKS BY READING OUR PRODUCT SHEET HERE.

A New AI Software Product Shaping the Future of Refinery Profitability

Beyond Limits LUMINAI Refinery Advisor addresses the most critical challenges faced by refinery stakeholders to accelerate digital transformation. From training a whole new workforce to unifying cross-functional teams and increasing crude purchasing options while dealing with variability and reduced margin from market oversupply, the Advisor provides a premier AI for refinery software. With the unprecedented ability to capture the knowledge and expertise of the most highly skilled operators and engineers before your best people retire, the Advisor is equipped to meet your most ambitious profitability plans.

 The outcomes paint a crystal-clear picture; real-world implementations of Beyond Limits LUMINAI Refinery Advisor have achieved increases in heavy feedstock utilization, operator adoption timetables in only a matter of weeks, and increases in refinery efficiency with 17% more time on plan efficiency improvements in some cases – resulting in significant profitability.

Advanced artificial intelligence software solutions like Beyond Limits LUMINAI Refinery Advisor provide transparent recommendations for visibility into operations on a global scale. Such holistic capabilities are being leveraged by refinery stakeholders to reach an elevated comprehension of how best to apply their valuable data while acquiring superior insight into how domain expertise and knowledge play in the decision-making process. Get ready because AI in refining results in the extraction of more value from your operations. Ready to get started? Contact products@beyond.ai

 TO SEE EVEN MORE ABOUT HOW BEYOND LIMITS LUMINAI REFINERY ADVISOR CAN GIVE YOU THAT COMPETITIVE EDGE, CHECK IT ALL OUT HER.