Automated cause and effect analysis for process plants

Cause & Effect (C&E) analysis for process plants is one of the tasks associated with Process Control Engineering (PCE). With the availability of electronic Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), a Computer-Aided system is developed to carry out the analysis automatically by encoding knowledge related to PCE in rules so that they can be applied to a given set of P&IDs to produce the corresponding C&E Diagrams. This paper describes how this is achieved. A rule-based system and an instrument checker are developed. They are used to generate the results and the results are displayed in a format that complies with ISO 10418 (ISO, 2003).