2016 Volume 49 Issue 7 Pages 673-679
In the chemical industry, the components of the production process are 1) production plant personnel, 2) the production unit, and 3) the production support system (PSS). These elements are the sources of process resilience. Resilience refers to the capability to restrain the disruptive signals that occur inside and outside the production process. The resilience always changes and its deterioration invites various influences that disturb the production activities. Therefore, it is necessary to observe, maintain, and improve the resilience to maintain productivity. However, quantitative estimation of resilience has not been attempted yet, because estimating the resilience can be difficult. The reasons are 1) the sources of resilience are not clear, 2) the scale of estimation is not specific, and 3) the object to be restrained is not apparent. In this paper, a metric, criterion of measurement, and method for quantitative estimation of resilience in a PSS in the production process are proposed. The procedure to estimate the resilience is as follows. First, the skills of the production plant personnel are classified into three categories: operational, memory, and communication skills. Next, the work hours of production plant personnel in the daily routine are measured, and based on these data, the work hours devoted to each skill (WHDS) are estimated to obtain the value of the skills (VOS). The value of the skills is the criterion used to estimate the skill of the production plant personnel, and this value includes the level of the skills and the knowledge of the production plant personnel. As each function of the PSS is implemented instead of the skills of the production plant personnel, it is possible to obtain replaceable work hours devoted to the skills by PSS. Therefore, based on the level of the skills and knowledge replaced by the PSS in the daily routine of the production plant personnel, the resilience produced by the PSS can be estimated.
