AGC plays ‘Chopin’

Japan’s AGC has announced that it has developed an integrated operation and quality management system for chemical plants called ‘Chopin’. This follows test runs at a fluorinated resin ring plant at the Chiba site in 2019, which reduced working time by more than 11 hours/day and generated savings of Y100 million through more stable operation.

“Chopin is a system that enables integrated management by digitising all information related to plant operation that was previously conducted on multiple systems, as well as operator task instructions, task logs, and workflow information,” the company said. It is described as a “hybrid of cloud and in-plant systems”, which “enables continuous operation even in the event of a cloud or public network failure”.

A workflow dashboard shares progress on the plant floor in real time, while the operation dashboard manages each plant’s KPIs centrally, and ‘yellow cards’ share operational near-miss incidents and use this information to pass on technologies and skills.

Full deployment of Chopin will begin in 2021. By 2023, it will be expanded to all chemical plant facilities at the Chiba and Kashima plants, with the aim of fully digitising operation know-how. In the long term, AGC plans to promote the use of real-time data using mobile handsets so that inspection data of plant floor work can be input into the operation management system sequentially.