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M3 scheduling

Asset Planning, Scheduling and Optimization Software

Planning and scheduling systems play a vital role in process industry supply chain management. The scheduling decisions involve many competing factors such as: achieving economic targets and handling environmental regulations, meeting quality requirements and reducing quality giveaway, supplying adequate feedstock and reducing feedstock inventories, quickly responding to operation disturbances and maintaining operation safety. Scheduling a site is a complex and multi-dimensional task, requiring the coordination of many schedulers and operators.

SIMTO systems represent the new technology trend for process industry scheduling systems - visualization and optimization. A scheduling problem can generally be described as a set of objectives and sets of constraints. A scheduling process aims to generate a long-term or a short-term detailed operation plan to achieve these objectives while respecting these constraints. The traditional black box optimization approach has not been successful because it is difficult to handle business rule changes and the lack of schedulers' inputs during the scheduling process.

Visualization technology provides the right tool for schedulers to identify the scheduling problems and interactively solve the problems. Optimization technology helps the scheduler achieve maximum profitability and find feasible solutions on short-term and long-term schedules.

SIMTO software technology has a number of licensable components. Common features of SIMTO Product Family include user-friendly interfaces, visualization of results and multi-user & multi-site operation.

User-Friendly Interfaces - Flowsheets simplify the complexities of manufacturing processes. Gantt charts provide graphic views of schedules. Users interact with the programs through window-based forms.

Visualization of Results - SIMTO applications in the right context generate visualized simulation results on flowsheets. By pointing to a facility of interest, all related information at the selected time, such as parameters, feeds, products, components, and quality, are shown in an information window. The facility can be a dock, a pipeline, a tank, a processing unit, or a stream.

Multi-user and Multi-site Operation - SIMTO applications make collaboration easy by providing multi-user and multi-site operation. Users can be assigned to one of the following roles: administrator, nominator, scheduler, and viewer. Depending on their roles, some users can make and save changes to all or certain parts of the scheduling system, but all users can view the schedule and do what-if analysis. The enterprise architecture of SIMTO applications improves communication and promotes coordination and drives business intelligence within the enterprise.

In addition: - M3 Technology's SIMTO applications track tank inventories and qualities and stream physical properties from feeds to products, from the beginning to the end of each activity in a schedule, and at user-defined intervals. Predefined or ad hoc trend charts display these values against time for reviewing and predicting. Schedulers can use the inventory planning board, a visual tool combining a trend chart and a Gantt chart, to do sensitivity analysis on the effects of adding receipts or shipments on inventory and to possibly prevent overflow or underflow conditions. SIMTO applications also generate tables of simulation results in standard formats for instant viewing or in custom formats for reporting. Reports can be sent to other systems through data integration.

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