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EP-4741964-A2 - MANUFACTURING SYSTEM FOR MONITORING AND/OR CONTROLLING ONE OR MORE CHEMICAL PLANT(S)

EP4741964A2EP 4741964 A2EP4741964 A2EP 4741964A2EP-4741964-A2

Abstract

A system (10) for monitoring and/or controlling one or more chemical plant(s) (12) including at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34), wherein the at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) is associated with a secure network (20) and communicatively coupled to an interface (26) for providing process or asset specific data or process applications to an external processing layer (30), wherein the at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) is configured to add a transfer tag to the process or asset specific data or to the process application and to provide the process or asset specific data or the process application based on the transfer tag.

Inventors

  • DE CAIGNY, Jan
  • VAN LOON, Bart
  • Gau, Sebastian
  • ENGEL, DANIEL

Assignees

  • BASF SE

Dates

Publication Date
20260513
Application Date
20201208

Claims (15)

  1. A system (10) for monitoring and/or controlling one or more manufacturing facility(ies) based on chemical processes including at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34), wherein the at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) is associated with a secure network (20) and communicatively coupled to an interface (26) for providing process or asset specific data or process applications to an external processing layer (30), wherein the at least one processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) is configured to add a transfer tag to the process or asset specific data or to the process application and to provide the process or asset specific data or the process application based on the transfer tag.
  2. The system of claim 1, wherein the system includes a first processing layer (14.1, 14.2) and a second processing layer (16, 32, 34) associated with the secure network (20) and optionally an external processing layer (30), wherein the external processing layer (30) is configured to add a transfer tag to the process or asset specific data or to the process application and to provide the process or asset specific data or the process application based on the transfer tag.
  3. The system of claim 2, wherein the first processing layer (14.1, 14.2) is configured to contextualize the process or asset specific data by adding the transfer tag, wherein the second processing layer or the external processing layer are configured to contextualize process applications by adding the transfer tag.
  4. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) is configured to add a transfer tag to the process or asset specific data or the process application on generation or on entry point into the system (10) or the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34).
  5. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the transfer tag includes at least two transfer settings, wherein the at least two transfer settings relate to confidentiality settings and/or third-party transfer settings.
  6. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to provide contextualized process and asset data or process applications to a third-party system based on the transfer tag.
  7. The system of claim 6, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to perform a third-party compliance check before transfer to a third-party system.
  8. The system of claims 6 or 7, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to access a third-party compliance database and to determine transfer compliance based on the third-party transfer setting including a third-party identifier and at least one information category.
  9. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to receive external data or external applications.
  10. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to contextualize external data or external applications by adding the transfer tag.
  11. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to deploy external applications depending on third-party transfer setting signifying internal data ingestion.
  12. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to contextualize internal applications by adding the third-party transfer setting signifying external data ingestion.
  13. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to deploy internal applications depending on the third-party transfer setting of the external data ingestion.
  14. The system of any of the preceding claims, wherein the processing layer (14, 16, 32, 34) or the external processing layer (30) is configured to initiate, prevent or control the process of providing process or asset specific data or process applications according to the transfer tag.
  15. A method for monitoring and/or controlling one or more manufacturing facility(ies) based on chemical processes including at least one processing layer, wherein the at least one processing layer is associated with a secure network and communicatively coupled to an interface for providing process or asset specific data or process applications to an external processing layer, wherein the method comprises the steps of: - adding a transfer tag, via the at least one processing layer, to the process or asset specific data or to the process application and - providing the process or asset specific data or the process application, via the at least one processing layer, based on the transfer tag.

Description

FIELD The invention relates to a system for monitoring and/or controlling one or more chemical plant(s) including at least one processing layer. BACKGROUND Chemical production is a highly sensitive production environment particularly with respect to security. Chemical plants typically include multiple assets to produce the chemical product. Multiple sensors are distributed in such plants for monitoring and control purposes and collect masses of data. As such chemical production is a data heavy environment. However, to date the gain from such data to increase production efficiency in one or multiple chemical plants has not been fully leveraged. Applying new technologies in cloud computing and big data analytics is hence of great interest. Unlike other manufacturing industries, however, process industry is subject to very high security standards. For this reason, computing infrastructures are typically siloed with highly restrictive access to monitoring and control systems. Owing to such security standards, latency and availability considerations contravene a simple migration of to date embedded control systems to e.g. a cloud computing system. Bridging the gap between highly proprietary industrial manufacturing systems and cloud technologies is one of the major challenges. WO2016065493 discloses a client device and a system for data acquisition and pre-processing of process-related mass data from at least one CNC machine or an industrial robot and for transmitting said process-related data to at least one data recipient, e.g. a cloud- based server is described. The client device comprises at least one first data communication interface to at least one controller of the CNC machine or industrial robot, for continuously recording hard-realtime process-related data via at least one realtime data channel, and for recording non-realtime process-related data via at least one non-realtime data channel. The client device further comprises at least one data processing unit data-mapping at least the recorded non-realtime data to the recorded hard-realtime data to aggregate a contextualized set of process-related data. Moreover, the client device comprises at least one second data interface for transmitting the contextualized set of process-related data to the data recipient and for further data communication with the data recipient. WO2019138120 discloses a method for improving a chemical production process. A plurality of derivative chemical products are produced through a derivative chemical production process based on at least some derivative process parameters at a respective chemical production facility, which chemical production facilities each comprises a separate respective facility intranet. At least some respective derivative process parameters are measured from the derivative chemical production process by a respective production sensor computer system within each facility intranet. A process model for simulating the derivative chemical production process is recorded in a process model management computer system outside the facility intranets. US20160320768A1 discloses an example network environment for monitoring plant processes with system computers operating as a root-cause analyzer. The system computers communicate with the data server to access collected data for measurable process variables from a historian database. The data server is communicatively coupled to a distributed control system (DCS) in turn communicating collected data to the data server over communications network. The object of the present invention relates to a highly scalable and flexible computing infrastructure for process industry, which adheres to the high security standards. SUMMARY Proposed is a system for monitoring and/or controlling one or more chemical plant(s) including at least one processing layer and optionally an external processing layer, wherein the at least one processing layer is associated with, configured, situated ot hosted in or inside a secure network and communicatively coupled to an interface for providing process or asset specific data or process applications to an external processing layer, optionally wherein the external processing layer is configured to provide process or asset specific data or process applications to the at least one processing layer, wherein the at least one processing layer or optionally the external processing layer is configured to add a transfer tag to the process or asset specific data or to the process application and to transfer or provide the process or asset specific data or the process application based on the transfer tag. Proposed is further a method for monitoring and/or controlling one or more chemical plant(s) including at least one processing layer and optionally an external processing layer, wherein the at least one processing layer is associated with a secure network and communicatively coupled to an interface for providing process or asset specific data or process ap