Automation of real time monitoring and controlling of a marine loading arm

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to automate the operations and real time monitoring and controlling of a marine loading arm. Design/methodology/approach: A generic control strategy to automate the operation of manually controlled marine loading arms has been developed. This strategy employs state of the art, industry standard position sensors, PLC systems, interactive human machine interface (HMI) and integrates fail-safe operation and emergency shutdown procedures. Findings: This approach satisfies all the industry safety regulations and liminates the possible risks and/ or spurious trips during product loading. The overall engineering process is simpler, easier to implement and manage due to the fact the industry standard equipment and design tools have been used. Using this generic strategy, manually operated marine loading arms can be automated for effective monitoring and controlling purposes. Practical implications: It is expected that engineers around the world can benefit by this approach and will be able to design similar control equipment to automate the functionality of loading arms in their organizations. Originality/value: This work is the authors' own. Thoughts and designs belong to them and the ideas presented are completely original, developed, implemented and tested by them over years.