Located in the port of Antwerp, Total Raffinaderij Antwerpen is the largest and most complex refinery of the Total Group, and Europe’s second largest refinery by size. Total Raffinaderij Antwerpen is the vital link in Total’s integrated petrochemical complex in Belgium. Supertankers unload crude oil at the Rotterdam MET terminal. This crude oil, with a low or a high sulphur content, is transported to Antwerp by pipeline where it is processed in the refinery into high quality products such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene for the European and American markets, as well as into base products including naphtha, butane and aromatics for the petrochemicals sector.

Business Case

The offsites part of the Total refinery consists of approximately 7000 manually operated valves. All valves are under control of the central Yokohama system. However, the manual operated valves can not be opened or closed remotely: these have to be operated by the operators in the field.

Field operators carry a ruggedized ATEX zone 1 mobile device (Gas and Dust Certified). This device continuously displays an up-to-date list of the valves the field operator needs to operate. Each valve is identified by an RFID tag. This tag is scanned before the valve is either opened or closed. This to ensure that the correct valve is being operated. By means of the mobile device, the central backend is immediately informed of the closure or opening of the valve.

Implementation

PeopleWare is currently implementing this business case. The mobile solution is built on top of our Mobile Development Framework. This PeopleWare framework incorporates all components and ingredients that a standard mobile solution requires. Hence, we can focus the development work to tailoring very specific business requirements. The entire solution is built with the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Compact Framework technology.