About the Author

I grew up in an ethnic Irish neighborhood on the west side of Chicago in the 1960s/1970s and hold both American and Irish citizenship. I attended college in downtown Chicago at the University of Illinois and graduated with a BS in Chemical Engineering in March 1982. I am currently a Chartered Engineer in Engineers Ireland.

At a high level, my career has concentrated on using Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, such as Advanced Process Control/Optimization and Asset Optimization Technologies that helped customers in the process industries increase throughput, reduce manufacturing costs, increase asset availability, and reduce risk with progressive roles in technical, consulting, business, and marketing.

Due to the fact that I worked for Advanced Manufacturing Technology vendors for many years, I have spent considerable time in sales/marketing roles. I have been fortunate in that I have worked in over 60 plants in 25 countries on 6 continents.

Most of my “process” experience has been concentrated in the worldwide oil refining industry. However, I have also worked on projects in midstream, a couple ammonia plants, and in a large‐scale petrochemical plant.

While I spent the majority of my career working for vendors, my most recent experience was working directly for a massive petrochemical plant in the Middle East, filling a role in a group of technical experts, leveraged across more than 20 petrochemical plants. During my last year there, I requested and accepted a role to be the technical lead for the Advanced Control/Optimization project. For the three years prior to that assignment, I was a Senior Reliability Engineer providing consulting for the strategic portion of the program, in addition to being used for special projects when a seasoned engineer was required. Ultimately, I got to play significant roles on both the “process” and “asset” sides of the business, in addition to using my marketing and writing skills.

My personal interest has always been in the area of optimization. To that end, I have principally worn two hats in my career. One was to “optimize” the process side of the business using Advanced Process Control/Optimization, while I spent the second half of my career trying to optimize assets using various technologies. The essence of this book is to couple optimization of the processes with optimization of the assets thereby multiplying the benefits to the business.

While I am proud of my technical capabilities, I am business orientated and believe that technology should only be used if it achieves a specific business result. In my mind, business comes first. Technology only exists to further our business needs.

For that reason, the focus of this book has been generally on Optimization and, more specifically, on how Optimization and Monte Carlo simulation can be pragmatically combined together to optimize profitability in the process industries through better asset decisions. This book has walked the balance between business needs and how that can be achieved technically. In addition, it has described what organizational changes must be made for a company to effectively adapt modeling/optimization technologies. It has suggested a Program Master Plan.

To better appreciate the thoughts in this book and how I came to these conclusions, it’s important to traverse the path of how I became involved with asset optimization technologies and specific experiences I had earlier in my career.

Process Optimization Experience

While I will concentrate principally on my asset optimization experience in “About the Author,” it’s important to highlight what I learned during my early years as an Advanced Control and Optimization (ACO) engineer. From late 1987 until the early 2000s, I was an ACO engineer. I worked for SETPOINT until early 1994, where I learned both Advanced Control and Optimization. The latter is especially important as that is the focus of this book.

At that time, we were using closed equation optimization technologies. I was quite familiar with GRG2, which is a reduced gradient, nonlinear optimization, originally developed at the University of Texas. Many of you may have already worked with it, though you probably didn’t know it. That’s because it’s now embedded within Excel as the Solver. That’s what we will use for the majority of optimization problems in this book.

When I left SETPOINT, I joined Continental Controls, where I developed their multivariable controller, for which I received a US patent.ix I was so impressed with GRG2 during my time working at SETPOINT that I used it as the mathematical engine for this new multivariable controller. What I did was fundamentally write a sophisticated “wrapper” that called the GRG2 mathematical algorithm to perform nonlinear multivariable control.

Those early years working with optimization were important because I became convinced that one essential missing ingredient in asset management was the lack of an emphasis on true optimization. What you’ll see in this book is that we will be now combining, and augmenting, system modeling with optimization technologies.

Another thrust during my years optimizing the process side was the emphasis that we placed on driving business benefits. I had the opportunity to lead many process studies where we had to justify our projects based on business benefits. As I moved to the asset side of the business, that justification seem to be lacking, or only haphazardly done.

I should also note that while at SETPOINT, I served as the Hydroprocessing Technology Manager. That will explain why you’ll see so many hydroprocessing examples in the book.

Asset Modeling/Optimization Experience

In early 2003, my career changed significantly. In the 15 years proceeding that, I had been focused on Advanced Process Control and Optimization. However, due to a rather dramatic and unanticipated career shift, I found myself as the Director of Sales and Marketing at Clockwork Solutions.

Clockwork was a pure play RAM high‐end software modeling company. I was tasked with selling projects to clients to improve their ability to make better design and spare parts decisions using RAM, as well as other standard uses of the technology that we now take for granted. Unfortunately, what I soon learned was that up to this point in time, there had been little adoption of this technology within the process industries. In fact, there had been more projects executed within the military aerospace industry, rather than in refining and petrochemicals. As a new salesperson, this was especially disconcerting, to say the least.

Furthermore, the people attracted to a company like Clockwork were technical types and not nearly as business focused as I had grown accustomed to in my career. Even more troubling was that RAM modeling was still largely a “cool” technology in search of some practical business problems to solve.

In fact, the technology was not even being sold properly. Everything was backward. Normally, one starts with a business problem and evaluates different technologies and their potential unique abilities to solve a particular problem. However, in this case, it was just the opposite. Here, the technology already existed, but it wasn’t clear at all as to what business problems this technology could be used to solve. If I were to have any hope of surviving in my new sales role, I needed to articulate that – and quickly.

Of course, from a sale person’s perspective, the problems the technology can solve must occur frequently enough that a company would be interested in purchasing software and accompanying services. In addition, the cost/benefit of solving those problems needs to be such that that a company would be interested in spending money on them. Plus, the sales process needs to occur in a timeframe where I could close enough deals so my employer would keep pursuing this business area. I knew I was in trouble.

For all those reasons, I decided to write a paper and give a presentation at the National Petrochemical and Refining Association (NPRA) conference in March 2004 that detailed how RAM modeling driven by an optimization technology could be used by a refiner to increase the quantity of gasoline being produced based on the availability of the different units producing gasoline components, balanced against the cost of various potential improvement projects.x

In essence, this presentation showed how to answer an important business question. That is, where should I spend my next dollar to optimally increase availability? That entire presentation was eventually republished by Petroleum Technology Quarterly in April 2004.xi

As is so often the case with marketing, it takes times for an idea to gain acceptance. Based on the response from that conference, it became clear that the industry wasn’t ready for this technology any time soon and that it would likely take years for large‐scale interest and/or adoption.

Since Clockwork would not be moving fast enough for my interests, I decided there might be a niche use for this technology that I could exploit as an entrepreneur. To that end, I started writing a VBA‐based program on my own using Monte Carlo simulation modeling that would determine the optimal turnaround timing between units based on the reliability performance of different equipment within the units. To garner funding for the idea, I applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a small company I had...