On the Design of an Operator Training Simulator in a South African Pipeline Network

Pipeline operating companies require skilled employees to operate their pipeline network with safety and meeting the customer’s nominations, seeking to reduce costs and preserve the environment. A useful pipeline operational functionality designed to train, qualify and certificate operators to perform those tasks successfully is the Operator Training Simulator (OTS). OTS reproduces operational scenarios without the necessity of being inside the control room, allowing the trainee to simulate daily operational routines such as pumps startup/shutdown, valves opening/closing, slack line prevention, leak identification and others. This work presents a detailed description of an Operator Training Simulator to be employed in a South African pipeline network, comprising around 2500km of pipes handling multi-products and crude oils. The designed OTS shall allow the trainee to have exactly the same environment the operator has at the control room, including machines, screens and functionalities like Leak Detection as well as Batch/Pig Tracking. Two modes of OTS operation are cited: an offline and an online one. The offline mode performs any simulation from a configured offline scenario. On the other hand, online mode allows the trainee to see actual real time data on a passive mode (without interfering with real operation). Besides, it can get a desirable real time scenario and continue from that point in an offline way, i.e. loading a start state scenario. Finally, it shall be presented and discussed the interaction between the OTS and the ability to reproduce local station operational sequences. The gain obtained with such interaction, as well as the consequent introduced complexity, is also commented.