Denis Kirchhübel defended his PhD thesis, titled “Combining Functional Modelling and Reasoning with on-line Event Analytics”, on 27 April 2020. The PhD project was part of the Water Management project belonging to the Danish Hydrocarbon Research and Technology Centre.
Many people participated in Denis’ PhD defense on Monday morning. Taking advantage of the online format, people outside of Denmark or in other parts of the country were able to log in and listen to his presentation.
The overall aim of the project is to provide decision support to operators working in control rooms of modern industrial plants. Control room operators are tasked with plant supervision and are provided with a large number of sensor and status information. They must intervene when abnormal situations occur. Alarms are intended to draw operators’ attention to situations that require immediate action, but the amount of information provided can actually reduce their focus and prevent them from maintaining situation awareness.
Denis’ work contributes to an operator support approach (see AlarmTracker project) based on a functional representation of the process flow and operating goals in Multilevel Flow Modelling (MFM). The qualitative diagnosis in MFM facilitates the identification of root causes from the large amount of data. This can reduce the risk of overloading operators, allowing them to focus on the most likely root causes and an efficient mitigation strategy.
The two major aspects that Denis considered in his work are: maintaining correct causal analysis based on all occurring alarms and ensuring that the MFM model used for diagnosis fits the current plant situation.
After an engaging presentation and an in-depth discussion on his work, Denis was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy title.
Congratulations, Denis!
Find out more about the Water Management project.