Honeywell and Princeps Partner to Improve Refining Supply Chain

Honeywell will phase out their Refining and Petroleum Modeling System (RPMS), transferring their existing customers to Princeps. Honeywell promises a seamless transition to the Princeps scheduling and planning tools.

 

Refining and Petroleum Modeling System (RPMS)

Petroleum industry experts have used RPMS to develop solutions for several refining challenges, such as planning, purchasing, investing, scheduling, and others. 

 

 

Honeywell decided to transition customers to Princeps, who specialize in navigating the complexities, risks, and rewards in refining. 

Honeywell chose Princeps due to its innovative software and better decision support offerings to help customers more efficiently adjust operations.

 

Princeps Software and Modeling 

Princeps software focuses on evaluating crude oil streams and the purchasing, scheduling, and usage of them in a refinery. Their software can run simulations of different crude oils, how to blend them, and then evaluate their output and profit margins. 

These simulations account for a variety of inputs based on supply and demand variables, as well as design considerations, such as storage capacity, chemical flow limitations, and preventative maintenance demands. 

Once the most favorable solutions are developed, the Princeps software shows how to implement the refinery solutions. Users can alter these models during runtime to account for up-to-date market variations. 

Princeps hopes to bring better insights to downstream customers, such as oil refiners and petrochemicals, to run operations more efficiently and maximize margins.

The partnership takes advantage of the large-scale industrial controls and sensor expertise from Honeywell, as well as the modeling, simulation, and complex computing offered by Princeps. 

 

Potential Benefits for Petroleum and Refining Industries

Because Princeps specializes in the petroleum industry, they can provide the customers with the latest models and insight into how the markets will behave and how crude oil from different sources are blended. 

 

An example of an oil refinery with Honeywell’s systems. Image courtesy of Honeywell. 

 

Simulations can be rapidly created on a server farm and managed through Princeps, taking the heavy-lifting of the computing off-site. 

Honeywell develops all manner of industrial systems and provides the data acquisition for these simulations and the controls to adjust the process based on the simulation data. 

Wrapping up the advanced computing power in a seamless package that looks like the original Honeywell RMPS interface summarizes this partnership. It’s akin to putting a larger engine in a muscle car—the controls look the same, but they are very different under the hood.

This past year has proved to be volatile for the petroleum and refining industries. While the world fought the COVID-19 pandemic, oil prices bounced as high amplitude waves. The collapse of the tourism and travel industries, changes in labor forces, and unpredictable crude oil supplies acted as driving forces in the market fluctuations. 

Given this unusual year, petroleum companies will need to squeeze every penny from crude blend and scheduling optimization, making the Honeywell and Princeps partnership a competitive advantage.