C Visual Explorer (CVE)

Discover why you have a process historian! You knew there was lots of new process knowledge representing improvement opportunity hidden in all that data and thought that you could extract it. Then you realised that engineers lacked the tools they needed so could only pick at a few highlights. CVE is the tool that you have been missing and with CVE you will discover exactly why it was such a good decision to buy a process historian.  

Process plant data is different from the data usually explored with the traditional 'data mining' and 'predictive data analytics' methods that you may have learnt in college because it is highly correlated amongst hundreds or thousands of variables so that there are many, many correlations between variables. That means the problem is not that of finding correlations but is one of recognising those that were previously unknown and have value amongst the many that you already know or that are are direct consequences of the underlying chemistry, mass, heat and momentum balances in your particular process.

Correlations in themselves don't identify cause and effect. That requires the engineers process knowledge so the method needed also has to be quick and straight-forward to use and explain to others for busy engineers with many other tasks to accomplish during their working day.
That Process Plant Data is also often highly non-linear, and non-linearities can be easily seen in CVE, often for the first time, adds to its uniqueness and demands the ability provided by CVE to easily separate out individual modes of non-linear behaviour.

C Visual Explorer (CVE) provides a graphical representation of the values of many hundreds to a few thousand process and result variables using a parallel coordinates graph tailored by us as chemical engineers to the particular needs of process plants. The parallel coordinates graph is a coordinate transformation from n-dimensions (each variable is a dimension) to 2 dimensions and many other mathematical properties. This unique visual method allows engineers to very quickly see and extract process insight from the data already collected by your historian and without involving any mathematics of the part of the user. CVE can be used for continuous and for batch processes and even for mixed batch/continuous processes. CVE is fully supported and continuously developed with the just-released CVE 2.6.0 representing the 6th major addition of new functionality this century. We are already working on 2.6.1 and planning for CVE 2.7.0.


Using CVE you can:

	Understand your process and how it can best operate by combining process historian data with data from other repositories such as laboratory analyses, emission measurements, raw material assays and more.
	Optimise your operations without changing how you work by understanding what an Operating Window really is and what we mean when we talk of a 'consistent' window.
	Optimise even more but disruptively by finding the Operating Envelope required to achieve a particular set of business objectives and using the Operating Envelope in real time (requires CPM also) to implement 'boundary control' to supplement existing process controls.
	Find better operator alarm limits in a fraction of the man-days you take with todays methods and have immediate alarm performance predictions available as you interactively change alarm limit values before and during the alarm review meeting. Our methods will take you all the way to predictive alarming (requires CPM) if your ambitions extend that far.
	Find the Operating Windows and Envelopes that show you where to operate to meet all your KPI's, not just the ones you can measure in real-time
	Find which variables are contributing most to variability.
	Use CVE on a daily basis for process stewardship by the Process Engineer. Have him share the experience with the unit operations team. They are best placed to understand and explain what is different about todays operations and why and in much the best position to make immediate corrections. You will find average efficiency increasing and variability decreasing

Your historical operating data and offline quality measurements contain incredible amounts of information about how your process behaves that you really haven't been able to extract until now. By unlocking this information you can regain control, reduce waste, increase yields, improve product quality, control your emissions and ultimately reduce costs!

But How?

CVE uses a unique form of geometry to convert historical data into a single visual summary. The technology also enables you to select periods when top quality outputs were achieved and then control your process to only mimic these conditions. The result? A better process you are in control of!

What next?

Take a look at the video on the right and, if you aren't yet ready to call us, book onto one of our introductory webinars.