TR035: Reduced Delivery Time for a Customized, New-Type of Power Plant, Through the Use of AI Technology

Process plants are changing significantly in response to the needs of customers. The most important demand will often be that the process plant must be environmentally clean. The changes in process plants and the industrial environment requires that the methods used to design and build process plants must change. The methods must be:

• highly automated
• fast
• flexible
• integrated
• related to R&D efforts

so that the latest results can be implemented immediately. In this paper we take a power plant as an example of process plants and we present what must be changed in the power-plant manufacturing industry in order for the customer to get the needed services.

In the first section we describe how the needs of customers in the power-plant business are changing. These changes are caused by problems in nuclear power plants, environmental damages, and the long-term shortage of fuels like oil, natural gas, and even uranium. According to the Conference on Technologies for Producing Electricity in the Twenty-First Century, coal is in the long term the most important fuel because of its availability. However, the use of coal demands new clean coal technologies. Because of these changes, the power-plant realization methods are not efficient any more and we describe the main problems.

In the next section we suggest a way in which the power-plant business should operate and the tools that will be needed. We describe the power-plant project in seven stages, starting with the development of the power-plant project and going to the last stage of maintenance. For each stage we suggest realization methods and tools to make them more integrated and efficient compared to today's practice. We also estimate the results of the suggested changes.

In the final section we consider how well the research work conducted in the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) at Stanford University supports the "grand view" presented in this paper. We also suggest new research projects for power-plant construction.