Pipeline Management Solution Released

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (the Netherlands) announces the release of the Enterprise Pipeline Management Solution (EPMS), a modular software suite that is the product of over 20 years of practical experience in implementing pipeline management solutions across the globe.

Developed for deployment at the heart of the pipeline operations management environment, the EPMS supplements the basic pipeline management system with specific gas and liquid applications that enable a pipeline operator to manage delivery contracts and associated logistics in a time and energy efficient manner. With a SCADA platform covering monitoring, alarming, trending, and reporting, the EPMS handles functions such as metering, batch scheduling & tracking, leak detection, and energy management within the same unified user environment.

Many pipeline systems in use today have been tailored to suit a specific set of circumstances and lack both a standard system foundation for supporting pluggable application modules and a core design that ensures interoperability with enterprise IT environments and policies. The maintenance and upgrade of tailor-made applications, and their often complex system architectures to protect them from breaches and security compromises, poses increasing challenges for pipeline operators.

Unified user environment based on a modular design Based on a well-designed modular platform that is both IT friendly and secure, the EPMS is a sustainable solution that can deliver pipeline applications in combination with common supervisory and monitoring functions. As no two pipeline applications are identical and operational philosophies can differ from one pipeline operator to the next, the EPMS's templates and functions can be easily modified without having to call in pipeline application experts.

The EPMS features improved alarm and human machine interface (HMI) management functions, and both it and its application platform were developed based on standards put forward by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the International Society of Automation (ISA), and comply with the strict regulations of the US Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). The EPMS employs leak detection, compensated volume balancing, and hydraulic profiling methodologies to monitor pipeline integrity under every type of operating condition. The EPMS is thus able to register possible integrity violations together with contextual information about the operational state of the pipeline so that personnel can quickly get to the bottom of any problem.

The EPMS continuously makes adjustments to the setpoint so that both compressors and pumps can be operated as close as possible to the optimal efficiency point. To manage exceptions during startup, the EPMS allows the assignment of business rules for the management of load sharing, compressor/pump restrictions, and alarm notifications at the compressor/pump station level. To identify areas for improvement, the EPMS can also record all key power statistics.

To minimise product waste, the EPMS measures and calculates the position of batches as well as anomalies such as trans-mix on a near real-time basis, and reports on the inventory balances.

With its transparent management of parameter exchange and the measurement of gas, liquids, and gas composition, the EPMS easily adapts to the desired measurement methodology and the level of intelligence of intermediate devices like flow computers, remote terminal units (RTU), and instruments. It processes the available inputs into normalised flow, volume, and energy values in accordance with the applicable American Gas Association (AGA) and API standards.

Shuji Mori, a Yokogawa vice president and head of Yokogawa Electric International, comments: "The EPMS will significantly reduce the amount of effort required to implement and commission high quality pipeline management applications while guaranteeing easy upgradability, protecting investments across multiple SCADA platform versions".

Main target markets include gas and liquids transmission pipelines and grids and upstream/midstream oil and gas production infrastructure.