The Relationship Between Loop Performance Monitoring and Loop Tuning

Imagine that you just purchased software to help with the tuning of your plant’s control loops.  You’re ready to enhance control and to improve production throughput and efficiency, right?  With software successfully installed you consider the 100s if not 1000s of PID controllers regulating your facility’s processes.  A question now comes into focus: Where do you start?

There is a direct linkage between PID tuning software and another, complimentary technology that provides enhanced awareness of controller performance issues.  Loop performance monitoring (LPM) technology maintains a constant watch on the relative effectiveness of each individual PID controller in your facility, and it simplifies the identification of loops that require tuning.

The following are three (3) ways that loop tuning and loop monitoring tools can significantly benefit your plant’s operations when used together:

1. Identify Priorities

LPM software finds underperforming PID loops and automatically prioritizes them.  Whether a critical loop, one that has exceeded a constraint, or another that’s demonstrated significant change, LPM technologies highlight the PIDs that require immediate attention and they rank them based on their importance.  They help you to determine which loops are impacted by poor tuning versus other common issues.

2. Isolate Root-Causes

Addressing the root-cause of a performance issue and not its symptoms can be challenging due to the highly interactive nature of most production processes.   The advanced forensic tools within most LPM offerings allow you to understand the relationship between and among control loops.  That enables you to get to the bottom of your plant’s performance issues and to apply your tuning software on the right loops.

3. Gain Recommendations

Recommendations for corrective action simplify the diagnosis and speed the correction of controller performance issues.  LPM software leverages your plant’s existing process data to uncover issues, assess them, and to provide an appropriate course of action.  Select LPM technologies actively capture your plant’s everyday output changes, recommending new tuning parameters and comparing their impact against existing parameters.  Your tuning software can then be used to “fine tune” for optimal control.

The benefits listed above are only three of the many that come with combining loop performance monitoring with loop tuning software.  Contact us if you’d like to learn more.