Agnihotri, R.
IBM Corp., Houston, Texas
Dr. Raj Agnihotri is a thought leader at IBM for chemicals, oil and gas, and LNG. He uses his extensive business and technical experience to visualize the future of process industries and their usefulness to society. His expertise covers program management, smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, plant operations, modeling, optimization, controls, capital projects, supply chain management, IT and entrepreneurship. He has worked for Texaco (Chevron), Honeywell and ABB, and has held C-level positions at Reliance and Yokogawa. For Chevron, Dr. Agnihotri was an advisor for the company’s “Refinery of the Future” project.
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate an autonomous operations (AO) vision, along with its feasibility, by conceptualizing a roadmap where meaningful progress can be achieved in a horizon of 3 yr–20 yr.
Progress in the driverless car segment has served to illuminate one of the major future goals in industrial and process manufacturing: autonomous operations in process plants—in other words, the autonomous plant. While AO for process plants has received interest from the process automation and control industry, limited serious discussion has taken place in the process operations and IT domains.
Hydrocarbon Processing Industry (HPI) companies are using digitalization in concert with improved processes and skills to squeeze more productivity from existing assets.