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Performance Measurement - The Rest of the Story

Part 20: Performance Measurement - The Rest of the Story (see below)
Part 19: How to Exploit Process Variability
Part 18: Are Your Valves Killing You?
Part 17: How to Tune for Both Setpoint Changes and Upsets
Part 16: How to Control a Process With Long Dead Time
Part 15: How to Manage Your Plant's Performance in Real-Time
Part 14: Which Tuning Method Should You Use?
Part 13: How to Automatically Find a Model Of Your Process
Part 12: Safety Factor: The Most Important Tuning Parameter
Part 11: Eliminate Cycling In Your Plant
Part 10: Quickly Tune Slow Loops
Part 9: How to Linearize Your Process
Part 8: When Should You Use Derivative Action?
Part 7: Plant Data for PID Tuning & Modeling
Part 6: Choosing the Best Filter
Part 5: When to use Honeywell A,B,C,D, Real or Ideal Algorithms
Part 4: The Best Sample Interval for Process Control
Part 3: Loop Stability - The Other Half of the PID Tuning Story
Part 2: Ziegler-Nichols Tuning Rules & Limitations
Part 1: PID Algorithms and Units

Performance Measurement - The Rest of the Story


by John Gerry, P.E.
See the complete presentation in more detail as a web-cast.
If we can precisely measure the performance of small areas in the plant, we have
a means of prioritizing maintenance efforts, engineering and we also have the
potential for improving the efficiency and productivity of large areas of plants. The
trick is effectively measuring the performance of the individual control loops that
contribute to each area or unit operation.

Harris Index
A performance measure typically discussed by academics is the Harris Index.
The Harris Index looks at the error signal which is the process variable or
measurement minus the setpoint. The Harris measures the ratio between the
error variance and the variance achievable by a minimum variance controller.
The larger the value, the poorer the performance of the loop. The Harris Index

calculation results in a number between 1 and infinity. A value of 1 is perfection or


minimum variance control. Larger numbers might be considered worse.
Current Variance
Minimum Variance

1 = perfect
larger = poorer performance

CLPA or Closed Loop


Performance Assessment
Another form of the Harris index is the
CLPA or Closed Loop Performance
Assessment. It is simply the Harris
index, normalized to be between 0 and
1:
CLPA = 1 - 1/(Harris Index)
With the CLPA:

0 = perfect control
1 = poorest control

Harris (CLPA) Misses Poor Tuning


The Harris index or CLPA does a good job of indicating loops that have
oscillation problems. Unfortunately the index considers loops that are sluggish to
be just fine. A controller not even running in automatic may give a small value for
the Harris index since without the valve moving much, the variance is low. Since
small values are generally good, the Harris index does not flag the sluggish
loops.
The Harris index does not detect when a loop has been detuned to the point of
sluggishness. The graph to the right is taken from a performance assessment
package that has assessed the control loops performance every hour. 13
assessments are shown on the graph represented by the points between the
green or red lines. This graph is showing one assessment metric, the Harris
index, plotted along with the integral time in the loop. The Harris index is the red
line and the integral time is the green line. During the seventh assessment the
integral time was increased by a factor of 5 as shown on the graph. However, the
Harris index shows no significant change before and after. As this graph
indicates, the Harris index does not detect the detuned controller.

These graphs show the


simulated response of the same
loop to a load upset. With an
integral time of 20, the response
of the control loop is clearly more
sluggish, yet the Harris index did
not pick this up. The green line is
with the integral time of 20, red
line for integral time of 5.

Performance Categories
In general, there are three broad categories of control loop performance in
plants.
1. The first and typically rarest are loops that are performing well.
2. The second is loops that are oscillating because of valve hardware or
over-aggressive PID tuning. The Harris index used as a performance
metric will catch these.
3. An operators typical response to a loop that is oscillating is to de-tune it.
The third category are loops that were oscillating and have been de-tuned.
The Harris index will not "catch" these loops.

Performance Metric That Catches De-Tuned Loops


ExperTune has developed a performance metric or index that measures how well
a control loop responds to process upsets. The index uses a process model
combined with current and optimal PID tuning values. The index can be found by
simulating the response of the control loop to a load upset with both sets of
tuning values. The simulation provides the data to calculate the integrated
absolute error between the setpoint and process variable for each case.
Integrated absolute error is abbreviated with IAE. With the IAE for each case, the
comparison can be made. The ExperTune index is:
100 x Current IAE - Optimal IAE
Current IAE
With the ExperTune Index:

0 = perfect control
larger = % performance improvement possible

The metric is unitless and provides a meaningful comparison between loops.


This metric will catch those loops that have been de-tuned. For example, loops
that have been detuned because they were oscillating.

Combine Several Metrics Into One


PlantTriage from ExperTune is a performance monitor that allows you to combine
several performance metrics into an overall performance metric. The overall
metric can contain the ExperTune Index, Harris Index, variability, average error,
oscillation detection, or any combination of over 40 available metrics. Combining
a number of metrics provides a balanced approach to defining control loop
health.

Conclusions
PlantTriage provides everything you need to manage your plants performance in
real-time. Browser-based reports make pinpointing and diagnosing problems
easy. They also make tracking performance easy. PlantTriage includes a host of
analysis tools for optimizing control systems including valve wear analysis, noise
and filter analysis, spectral analysis, response time analysis, simulation,
linearization, and characterization and PID Tuning.
2004 ExperTune Inc.

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