Yokogawa releases Enterprise Pipeline Management Solution

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.

Development background

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.

Key benefits

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.

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.