Monitoring Safety of Process Operations Using Industrial Workflows

An industrial workflow represents a sequence of tasks or actions that describes an operational procedure. In this paper, workflow strategies are developed that capture operational knowledge by analyzing event logs of how an operator has executed a procedure while controlling or monitoring a process. In this work, our prime focus is on infrequent process operations such as plant start-up and shutdown procedures. We propose a workflow conformance method to continuously monitor and compare operator actions with standard operating procedures (SOPs) and identify procedural violations that could compromise process safety and efficiency. An industrial case study is presented to illustrate applications of workflow conformance monitoring to identify operational problems associated with human factors, process and instrumentation.