VPI Soft Sensors
Design, calibrate and integrate real-time property predictors on any APC software platform
High-quality, real-time predictors
-
Develop high-fidelity predictors of critical properties of your process, based on historical process data and past lab results.
-
Deploy the soft sensors online, integrate them with any existing APC application, including Shell PACE, AspenTech AspenIQ, and Honeywell Profit Sensor Pro, and optimise your control system.
Accurate predictors of any unmeasured property, robust to any operating condition
Novel Hybrid Model
VPI Soft Sensors are based on a novel hybrid architecture for predictive models, which combines:
-
A high-quality, first-principle based model of your distillation column, easily configurable visually via a web application add-on to your VPI platform.
-
Advanced machine learning and statistical models, combining the modelled state variables of the column to create accurate and robust predictors, using historical DCS and laboratory data from your plant.
The result are extremely accurate software predictors, robust to any operating condition, that can replace any physical online analysers.
Our soft sensors are based on a novel hybrid architecture to achieve maximum prediction quality.
Build and calibrate models offline
The modelling process begins with an offline design stage:
-
VPI Soft Sensors is available as an add-on to VPI, a powerful visual data analytics platform, providing data aggregation from multiple historians, data conditioning, processing, and visual intelligence.
-
Using the VPI Soft Sensors graphical model building tools, you can configure first-principles models with input process variables, physical & material properties and other tuning parameters. You can test the model offline and evaluate model outputs.
-
The distillation column model is combined with a powerful statistical and optimisation engine, which combines them with historical laboratory analysis to titrate the predictor.
Our software suite provides graphical tools to configure first principles models, and feed their outputs into the statistical and optimisation engine and produce a hybrid soft sensor.
Integrate soft sensors in real time
-
Completed soft sensors can be exported from the offline modelling suite and be integrated in an existing process control stack.
-
The soft sensors are combined with data available in real time to produce a high-frequency real time estimate with no delay. Thanks to the low computational effort, this type of application can run continuously, providing a constant monitoring of the unit operation.
-
Thanks to VPI Soft Sensors, you don't need to use costly online analysers to achieve highly optimised control performances.
Soft sensors can be exported from our software suite and integrated in an existing process control stack to produce real time estimates.
