Peterhead Power Station Adopt Pisys Simulator For Control Room Training

In 2011, Pisys was contacted on behalf of Peterhead’s Operations Manager. Ray Allen, Pisys’ Director responsible for the Peterhead relationship, comments, “Because of the scale of the project, SSE had to go out to tender. There were two other companies in contention – one of them a household name. The brief was to take the existing plant and model it in just enough detail for training purposes.” SSE Project Engineer Alex Wallace adds, “Providing a meaningful training experience hinged on being able to run realistic scenarios. And because of that, the plant had to be modeled to a high degree of integrity. It was evident that close working between the Peterhead team and the simulator developer would be critical to the success of the project. Pisys fitted the bill perfectly in this respect and also submitted a proposal featuring an attractive combination of price and build time.”

Ray continues, “Our basic architecture, already proven across many installations, separates the plant-specific aspect – the model of the asset – from the underlying simulation engine. We build our models top-down, embodying all the plant and process detail required for control room training without all the nuts and bolts and the molecular level physics. This approach allowed us to deliver a high-fidelity user experience at a much lower cost compared to fully blown simulators that emulate detailed physics.”

The need to replicate the Peterhead plant meant that the simulator project had a significant development element. Alex Wallace observes, “The systems and processes that had to be modeled were elaborate. Starting up and shutting down a generator, for example, involves a 10-hour sequence in 56 steps. Devising the best way to transfer and convert data from our PI plant data historian system into Pisys software was also pretty taxing. As was designing all the scenarios we could foresee needing for our course programs (like switching down from three turbines to two). To support Pisys’ development activity, we assigned one of our best engineers to the project.”

Malcolm Clark, Peterhead’s Simulator Training Lead, describes the close working relationship: “They more or less moved in with us. Two of the Pisys team sat in the room next door to me, building the simulation model, while a third worked literally alongside me, developing the live logic plans. It was a masterclass in inter-company teamwork.” Ray Allen adds, “Every technical discipline has its own vocabulary and language. We were fortunate to have Alex and Malcolm on hand, verifying our translation of the plant documentation and ensuring our model accurately represented the systems and interfaces trainees would need to master.”

Simulation training at Peterhead largely falls under two headings: basic training for new starts, such as introductory courses for new engineers, and more advanced training for control room operators. Simulator training is fundamentally rooted in a framework of scenarios. The simulator presents the trainee with an animated sequence of events mimicking an operational sequence of the plant. Based on this, the trainee plays the role of control room operator, responding to and managing the situation according to SSE’s operational procedures. The key to the success of simulator training is simple: the trainee learns the job by practicing in a safe environment without the risk of real-world consequences.

Malcolm Clark comments, “In a typical course, we use a blend of real situations – where we re-run data extracted from our PI Plant Data Historian system – and potential scenarios that haven’t yet happened. It’s a mixture of re-enacting past events and rehearsing possible futures. We don’t train droves of staff – it’s at the level of one or two people a month. The critical factor is ensuring control room staff can deal with unforeseen events quickly, which makes the Pisys simulator crucial to the Peterhead operation.”

Even before the Peterhead simulator was fully developed, it attracted interest from an unexpected quarter – plant engineering. Ray Allen explains, “Engineers started coming to us with queries about operational anomalies they had observed – along the lines of: ‘Step 42 in startup scenario B is taking much longer than we would expect.’ To resolve these queries, we started running ‘What if?’ scenarios on the simulator, akin to using it as an optimization tool.”

Malcolm Clark emphasizes, “It’s not actually a plant optimization system, but rather an alternative option for troubleshooting. If a plant engineer or a unit operator can sit down at the simulator and run through the relevant scenario, it provides a different viewpoint. The simulation model represents the plant control processes with a high degree of fidelity. This helps engineers understand whether there is a flaw in the design of a particular process and, if so, what the nature of the flaw is.”

Reflecting on the process of procuring their simulation training capability, Malcolm comments, “The Pisys simulator has paid for itself ten-fold already. Now a cold start takes seven hours – virtually a 50% reduction on the 13 hours it took before. Each cold start saves six hours of generating at hundreds of Megawatts.” Alex Wallace adds, “Overall, we got what we wanted, and it was a win-win. Pisys’s capabilities are excellent, and their team was very accommodating. There was a lot of additional work required, and Pisys completed it within the original budget.”