Two years ago the Rijeka Oil Refinery launched a project for implementation of a refinery information system to support overall production processes. A prerequisite for the establishment of an information system for production process support was construction of a computer infrastructure and data center. The main limiting factor in the design of the data center was the physical size of the server room in which it was planned to accommodate existing active communication equipment plus the new computing infrastructure using appropriate standards such as TIA-942, TIA-607 and IEEE 1100. Proposals for the use of available technologies on the market that were offered at the same time had properties such as very high availability, flexibility, modularity, optimized utilization of computing resources and physical space, centralized management; all together these are known as green computing. As the base for the manufacturing execution system the OSIsoft PI System was chosen; its support for all elements of the system in a virtual environment resulted in a significant reduction of investment in infrastructure, the data center, and overall energy consumption. The first indicators of a correct choice of strategy was implementation of the project on budget and on time, followed by later ease of management and scalability.
Speaker
Boris Žezelj
Boris Žezelj has been head of the process automation department at the Rijeka refinery of INA d.d. in Kostrena, Croation since 2009. He holds a degree as an IT Expert Specialist from the Polytechnic of Rijeka in their information technology in business systems course, and he has 20 years of experience working at the Rijeka refinery, starting in instrumentation, control systems and network technologies.