Dear Friends and Colleagues, As many of you already know, I decided to retire after 48 years of my career. My last day at work was July 31, 2015. Summing it all up, I was fortunate to have an exciting and rewarding career. It was exciting because I started my career at the time when application of Advanced Control and Operations Research methods just began in the field of process control promising to make it much more powerful. That made me learning new things constantly and kept my mind fully occupied during all this years. It was very exciting and stimulating to apply those methods to real-world problems and to witness the results that (sometimes) were very satisfying. It was rewarding because my work was appreciated by my customers, you and my superiors. I also was fortunate to working with many great professionals like you are. I enjoyed very much working with you, teaming up to design and implement (most of the time) sophisticated systems, solve challenging technical problems and socializing throughout the last 24 years of my career.Thank you. I will be missing all this excitement, but it’s time for me to move on and learn more about the world beyond industrial automation and operations management.

Responsible for design and implementation of Operations Management Systems (OMS) in the Process Industries. Led several OMS projects for various plants from conception to completion. Some of the major projects: Off-sites Operations Support Systems for three PDVSA refineries in Venezuela, Terminal Operations Management System for Cheniere LNG, OMS for ExxonMobil Lube Oil Blending and Packaging Plants. Led several OMS front-end engineering design studies for LNG receiving terminals and specialty chemical plants.

Responsible for development of innovative industry-specific solutions that enhanced company’s competitiveness in the market place. Led the development and implementation of the first Bailey’s Refinery Integrated Production Management and Control System based on the company products and third party software packages, developed OMS conceptual and functional design for specialty chemicals plants, participated in APC design and implementation for refinery process units and fertilizer plants. Led several OMS and APC front-end engineering design studies for petroleum refineries and gas processing plants.

Led application software design and installation of several process control systems such as Centralized Waste Storage and Transfer Facility utilizing Allen-Bradley PLC-5/60, MicroVAX 3100-80 and 11 IBM PC running FIX DMACS for Windows (Pratt & Whitney, United Technologies Corporation); Fugitive Emission Scrubber and 2 Batch Reactors utilizing PLC Modicon 984-480 and PARAGON 550 (Polaroid Corporation).

Responsible for application software design, implementation, and commissioning of the refining process control systems based on the DCS MOD 300. Managed application software design, implementation and startup for several refining process units (Fluid Catalytic Cracker Unit, Crude Distillation, Visbreaking, Catalytic Reforming). Participated, jointly with ABB Simcon, in the Fluid Catalytic Cracker Unit advanced control design utilizing Multivariable Predictive Controller, DMC.

Responsible for the development of Refinery OMS that included highly integrated packages of Advanced Planning and Scheduling, Data Reconciliation and Yield Accounting, and Refinery Modeling for Short-Term Scheduling. The Refinery OMS has been successfully implemented at several Russian and Eastern European refineries.