Operational decision making in the process industry; Multidiciplinary approach

The publication introduces a multidisciplinary approach to operational decision making (operation and maintenance) applied to the Finnish pulp and paper industry. The purpose of the approach is to produce knowledge and methods that support each other and which can be used to improve the support of operational decisions in the declared scope. After a general level introduction to current trends and challenges in the research domain, operational decision making is considered from several viewpoints. Each viewpoint analyses the current practices and provides means for improving the decision support. The analysis does not attempt to be fully coherent but, instead, provides new pieces of information which are relevant to the overall understanding of the requirements of effective operations’ decision support. The normative view on operational decision making, introduced in Chapter 2, is based on statistical decision theory. It considers a decision task as an optimisation problem, typically with multiple objectives and uncertainties, and provides a fundamental set of decision making elements. Chapter 3 presents a process monitoring and diagnostics view on operational decision making and describes new data analysis techniques for condensing and combining data. The new methods improve understanding of the process behaviour. The chapter also introduces performance measures for maintenance. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the organisational aspect of operational decision making. Chapter 4 considers the possibilities and constraints of human actors. Chapter 5 introduces a collaboration view on operational decision making that considers distributed decision making in human actor networks. New standards, technologies and their assignment in a new proposed IT architecture are presented in the Chapter 6. In addition, the information technology development path, from current information systems to new ones, is described.