by Gary Mintchell | Jul 23, 2015 | Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management
Tim Sowell, Schneider Electric (Wonderware) vp and fellow, has been writing a weekly blog that I report on for a while now. His Operations Management Systems Evolution blog is always thoughtful and informative.
Recently, I have discovered another Schneider Electric blog, this one by someone whom I do not know (I think)–Gregory Conary.
Each take a look at the Industrial Internet of Things in these posts.
Conary’s recent post discussed the “business opportunities we are seeing emerge from this megatrend.”
He cites information compiled by LNS Research, in its eBook Smart Connected Operations: Capturing the Business Value of the Industrial IoT. 47 per cent of respondents to its Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) online survey indicated that they did not expect to invest in IoT technologies in the “foreseeable future”. A further 19 per cent indicated that they did not expect to invest in IoT technologies in the next 12 months.
Conary states, “Frankly I’m not surprised. IIoT seems to bring with it the hype of something that will take a long time to adopt. In some cases I think this can be true. And while we are unclear on what time frame is meant by the term ‘foreseeable future’ referenced above, I believe there are business opportunities that can be capitalized on now and in the medium term. IIoT is more prevalent than we imagine. There are examples and business practices that we often don’t even recognize as being enabled by IIoT – things like increasing industrial performance and augmenting operators are two of the opportunities which can make a difference to your business now.”
Increased industrial performance
“Using data to improve industrial performance by connecting things to each other – this is happening now. How is it happening? Through wireless technologies, low cost sensors and using advanced analytics. In practice, this is a decision support system for complex manufacturing operations.”
I agree with Conary. We’ve had the foundation and platform for the Industrial Internet of Things for a long time. It just continues becoming more robust. As better data analytics algorithms are developed and better ways to communicate and display information are devised, then usefulness to manufacturing operators, maintenance technicians, engineers, and managers will increase dramatically.
Tim Sowell riffed off an article in Wired. “As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its run as one of the most popular technology buzzwords of the year, the discussion has turned from what it is, to how to drive value from it, to the tactical: how to make it work.
We need to improve the speed and accuracy of big data analysis in order for IoT to live up to its promise. If we don’t, the consequences could be disastrous and could range from the annoying – like home appliances that don’t work together as advertised – to the life-threatening – pacemakers malfunctioning or hundred car pileups.”
Sowell adds this analysis, “This follows on from my discussion 2 weeks ago around the need to avoid just gathering data, vs gaining the proportional amount of knowledge and wisdom, which brings in a term you hear a lot ‘machine learning’.”
From Wired, “The realization of IoT depends on being able to gain the insights hidden in the vast and growing seas of data available. Since current approaches don’t scale to IoT volumes, the future realization of IoT’s promise is dependent on machine learning to find the patterns, correlations and anomalies that have the potential of enabling improvements in almost every facet of our daily lives.”
Sowell concludes, “In the industrial world this more applicable than nearly all industries, and in many cases we are already applying “machine levels” at different levels. A key part in the shift from ‘Information’ to ‘knowledge’ is having the tools to drill into historians based on events and to discover learnings and patterns. Once validated and discovered these are turned into ‘self-monitoring’ conditions to understand the current state of the device, and predict / recognize conditions well before they happen. Providing the ‘insight’ to make awareness and decisions where the machines/ devices are telling you where the opportunities are. But a key part of machine learning is that this knowledge in not a once off step, it is a continuous evolution leveraging the gathering history data and developing increased amounts of knowledge.”
Final thought
Both Conary and Sowell point directly to the new reality and to new challenges. We can now gather much more data than we can make sense of. As soon as we have those tools, we will provide better tools to operations and maintenance to improve plant performance.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 23, 2015 | Automation, Events, Internet of Things, News, Operations Management, Process Control
Since I have to follow the Honeywell User Group (number 40, by the way) from afar, I’m relying on tweets and any Web updates or articles I can find.
So far, Walt Boyes (@waltboyes, and Industrial Automation Insider) has posted a few things to Twitter, mostly slides from presentations that are barely legible; Aaron Hand (Automation World) has posted a few tweets; Mehul Shah (LNS Research) has a couple of tweets—interestingly saying he things as an analyst that Honeywell has all the elements of a complete IIoT solution—hmmm; and Larry O’Brien, analyst at ARC Advisory Group has published a few tweets. If they would post links to articles in the tweets, that would be interesting.
Putman Publishing (Control magazine) once again is doing a digital “show daily” and therefore is posting several articles a day and blasting out an email daily.
Walt sent a tweet about obsolescence of open systems to which software geek Andy Robinson (@Archestranaut) replied. I didn’t understand until I saw Paul Studebaker’s article online (see below). The open systems in use today are getting long in the tooth. They feature Microsoft Windows XP—evidently never getting upgrades. Now there is no Microsoft support, the world has moved on, and all these DCS interfaces based on PCs are getting ancient.
Paul Studebaker, Control magazine’s editor-in-chief, reported on the keynote presented by Vimal Kapur, Honeywell Process Solutions president.
“ ‘Since Q4 of last year, since oil prices have changed, capital investments have been reduced’, said Kapur. Investments were up about 20% in 2010 and 2011, and remained flat through 2014, but so far, 2015 is down about 12%. Operational expense spending is also off.”
Kapur described how Honeywell is helping operators meet those challenges with strategies, technologies and services.
1. Honeywell will expand the role of the distributed control system (DCS). Now, the DCS has become a focal point of all control functions, taking on the functionality of PLC, alarm, safety, power management, historian, turbine control and more. Having a single system and user leverages scarce resources, and a single platform leveraging standards does more with less.
2. Cloud computing is becoming a standard part of HPS automation projects, with a logarithmic increase in the number of virtual machines in the HPS cloud over the past two years.
3. While process safety management has always depended on detecting unsafe situations, preventing them from causing an incident or accident and protecting people from any consequences.
4. For cybersecurity, Honeywell has created a team of specialists who can do audits, identify vulnerabilities and recommend solutions. But cybersecurity requires constant monitoring, so consider using a cybersecurity dashboard, “a step toward enabling a much higher level of proactivity by identifying cyber threats before it’s too late,” Kapur said.
5. Standardization holds great promise for reducing cost and time to production by allowing pre-engineering of control systems.
6. Honeywell continues to expand and refine its field device products to offer a complete line of smart instrumentation that can be preconfigured and use the cloud for fast auto-commissioning, and that have full auto-alerts and diagnostics to enable predictive maintenance.
7. OPC UA is becoming the key to leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
8. Kapur told attendees their existing investments are not fully leveraged.
9. Expansion of mobility is changing workflows and the responsibilities of individuals.
10. Honeywell is driving more outcome-based solutions in services.
Jim Montague, Control executive editor, reported on the technology keynote.
(Jim, you need to update your bio on the Control Global page)
“This is a transformative time in process controls, rivaling the open process systems introduced in the early 1990s,” said Bruce Calder, new CTO and vice president of HPS, in the “Honeywell Technology Overview and New Innovations” session on the opening day of Honeywell User Group (HUG) Americas 2015, June 22 in San Antonio, Texas. “Today, the words are cloud, big data, predictive analytics and IoT, but this situation is similar to when Honeywell pioneered and invented the DCS in the early 1970s. For instance, our Experion PKS integrates input from many sources, which is what big data and the cloud aim to do, and our Matrikon OPC solution gives us the world’s leading contender for enabling IoT in the process industries. And all these devices are producing lots more data, so the question for everyone is how to manage it.
“This is all part of the digital transformation that Honeywell has been leading for years. So Experion and our Orion interfaces enable IoT because they collect and coordinate vast amounts of data, turn it into actionable information and turn process operators into profit operators. At the same time, Honeywell enables customers to retain their intellectual property assets as they modernize and do it safely, reliably and efficiently.”
My analysis:
1. The downturn in the price of a barrel of oil whose impact we first noticed with the decline in attendance at the ARC Forum in February has really impacted Honeywell’s business.
2. Honeywell, much like all technology suppliers, addresses the buzz around Internet of Things by saying we do it—and we’ve always done it. (mostly true, by the way)
3. Otherwise, I didn’t see much new from the technology keynote—at least as it was reported so far.
4. I got some good reporting, but It’s a shame that all the media has retrenched into traditional B2B—reporting what marketing people say. You can read that for yourself on their Websites. Context, analysis, expertise are all lost right now. Maybe someone will spring up with the new way of Web reporting.
At any rate, it sounds like a good conference. About 1,200 total attendance. Even with oil in the doldrums, the vibes should be strong.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 11, 2015 | Automation, Networking, Operations Management, Software
GE set up a conference call for a conversation with Matt Wells, general manager of automation software at GE Intelligent Platforms.
The impetus for the call was to flesh out the press release about the development of the Global Discovery Server (GDS) for OPC UA and the first implementation of it into GE’s Cimplicity HMI/SCADA software.
Wells said that GE is really embracing OPC UA as a core technology. Controllers have it embedded within, and in fact, GE actually evaluated it for inter-controller communication. That latter did not work out, but OPC UA remains core to GE’s connectivity program.
But, Wells continued, OPC UA is not always the easiest to implement. So GE worked with the OPC Foundation to define global discovery server to simplify management of systems.
The first advance concerns namespace. If GDS resides on the network, it will first register clients and servers then GDS provide list of namespace. And not only this, it can say who can talk to whom and it can also restrict who talks.
Secondly, GDS acts as certificate store. It is not a traffic manager, bu it checks for a certificate for all OPC devices and it then handles handshaking among them.
GDS is available as independent software that can be installed in an application. GE did Cimplicity first, partly to show it can be done and how useful it is.
GDS Agent, not part of spec, can act as proxy for existing UA that is not GDS enabled.
Using GDS in an OPC network enhancing usability and ease of implementation. This should increase the adoption of OPC UA.
When my contact set up this conversation, she also mentioned we could discuss something called, “automated operator decision support”. This intrigued me. Turns out this is an alternative phrase for automated or digitized workflow.
I’ve only talked with a few companies that have incorporated workflow. I talked with GE several years ago for the first time. This should be an important advance for manufacturing productivity.
Here are some notes about the workflow conversation.
Overall in HMI/SCADA
1-prevent mistakes so minimize abnormal situations
2-can’t always encode everything, so give advance notification, predictive analytics
3-cant predict everything, so enable operators to quickly ID issue and solve, give corrective action procedures
4-“phone a friend”, utilize mobile techs to call SMEs; We found highest adoption enabling support staff, contact experts, decrease downtime
Digitize SOP policy, workflow; work to encode workflows, as it executes SOP solicit feedback from operator, can coordinate acts of operators and people around them. Make every operator the best operator—baked in—originally sold as risk management mitigation tool. It is popular in pharma and water, especially areas where compliance is crucial.
First step, look at compliances and improving process – process
Take written manual–>encode–>provide checklist–>maybe write directly into system for records–>then after compliance, start looking at optimizing.
It is designed to layer over existing infrastructure (HMI/SCADA, WMS, etc.).
Have seen performance improvements of up to 30%.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 27, 2015 | Operations Management, Software, Standards
Looks like there is a debate in the software development community again. This time around node.js
Dave Winer is a pioneer in software development. I used his first blogging platform, Radio Userland, from 2003 until about 2009 when it closed and I moved first to SquareSpace and then to WordPress. Below I point to a discussion about whether the node.js community needs a foundation.
His points work out for manufacturing software development, too. Groups of engineers gather to solve a problem. The problem usually involves opening up to some level of interoperability.
This is a double-edged sword for major suppliers. They’d prefer customers buy all their solutions from them. And, yes, if you control all the technology, you can make communications solider, faster. However, no supplier supplies all the components a customer wants. Then some form of interoperability is required.
Therefore, technologies such as OPC, HART, CIP, and the like. These all solved a problem and advanced the industry.
There are today still more efforts by engineers to write interoperability standards. If these worked, then owner/operators would be able to move data seamlessly, or almost seamlessly, from application to application solving many business problems.
Doing this, however, threatens the lucrative market of high-end consultants whose lock-in of custom code writing and maintenance is a billion-dollar business. Therefore, their efforts to prevent adoption of standards.
Winer nails all this.
I am new to Node but I also have a lot of experience with the dynamics [Eran] Hammer is talking about, in my work with RSS, XML-RPC and SOAP. What he says is right. When you get big companies in the loop, the motives change from what they were when it was just a bunch of ambitious engineers trying to build an open underpinning for the software they’re working on. All of a sudden their strategies start determining which way the standard goes. That often means obfuscating simple technology, because if it’s really simple, they won’t be able to sell expensive consulting contracts.
He was right to single out IBM. That’s their main business. RSS hurt their publishing business because it turned something incomprehensible into something trivial to understand. Who needs to pay $500K per year for a consulting contract to advise them on such transparent technology? They lost business.
IBM, Sun and Microsoft, through the W3C, made SOAP utterly incomprehensible. Why? I assume because they wanted to be able to claim standards-compliance without having to deal with all that messy interop.
As I see it Node was born out of a very simple idea. Here’s this great JavaScript interpreter. Wouldn’t it be great to write server apps in it, in addition to code that runs in the browser? After that, a few libraries came along, that factored out things everyone had to do, almost like device drivers in a way. The filesystem, sending and receiving HTTP requests. Parsing various standard content types. Somehow there didn’t end up being eight different versions of the core functionality. That’s where the greatness of Node comes from. We may look back on this having been the golden age of Node.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 16, 2015 | Asset Performance Management, Automation, News, Operations Management, Safety
Asset management, analytics, modeling, safety—some of the significant trends highlighted at last week’s ARC Industry in Transition Forum in Orlando—all popped up at the Bentley Systems press conference session. Highlights were acquisition of C3global and its Amulet Operational Analytics, acquisition of Acute3D and its reality modeling solution, and added process safety and risk management capabilities.
Operational Analytics
Bentley Systems has acquired U.K.-based C3global, provider of web-based Amulet software for operational analytics. Bentley’s AssetWise platform, which serves configuration management, asset health monitoring, inspection, maintenance, and compliance for infrastructure assets, can now deliver additional actionable insights as asset performance management is extended, through AssetWise Amulet, for asset performance modeling. AssetWise Amulet offers unique value in applying predictive and prescriptive analytics that are easily configurable at industrial scale to leverage just-in-time data for improved operational efficiencies.
Gartner recognizes C3global as part of the industrial analytics transformation helping digital businesses (as noted in Gartner’s “Industrial Analytics Revolutionizes Big Data in the Digital Business” report [G00264728], published August 19, 2014). Among the many infrastructure owner-operators benefiting from Amulet operational analytics are water utilities, oil and gas, and power transmission grids. User organizations include Babcock, BP, Chevron, Danfoss, Emerson, MWH, National Grid, South Australian Water, and Total.
AssetWise Amulet can be readily configured to build sophisticated applications tailored to infrastructure operations needs without having to know a programming language. It bridges the gap between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), enabling advanced analytics to be an integral part of all aspects of the business process. Through AssetWise Amulet’s interactive and easily configurable operational dashboards, owner-operators are provided with the context they need to be confident in their decisions and are afforded an easy method of measuring and managing the outcomes.
AssetWise Amulet is designed to integrate and analyze “big data” generated by a wide range of external applications and systems – from SQL or Oracle databases to enterprise data warehouses, industrial data historians, and control systems, as well as maintenance and work order management systems. The data can be structured or unstructured and include systems data, photos, video, log books, Microsoft Excel files, event failures, scanned notes, witnessed events, and more.
Once data from the IT and OT systems has been captured and aggregated, the software applies the users’ business rules, models, and knowledge to provide an improved view and understanding of operational performance for decision support. In conjunction with AssetWise-certified integrations to SAP EAM, IBM Maximo, and Oracle eAM, AssetWise Amulet will help drive the right actions at the right time, reducing operational risks and improving operational efficiency.
Reality Modeling
Bentley Systems also announced that it has acquired France-based Acute3D, provider of Smart3DCapture software for reality modeling. Through reality modeling, observations of existing conditions are processed into representations for contextual alignment within design modeling and construction modeling environments. Rapid technology advancements in scanning and photography – and especially the burgeoning application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for these purposes – are making the capture of such observations broadly and continuously affordable in sustaining infrastructure.
Acute3D software automates the generation of high-resolution, fully-3D representations from digital photographs taken with any camera, whether highly specialized or embedded in a smartphone. Scalable from site to city, and with precision limited only by the quantity and quality of photography, Acute3D technology can assure that existing conditions are contemporaneously considered throughout the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations of any infrastructure asset. Now that photo sequences from UAVs are likely to become the most feasible source for surveying, construction monitoring, and inspection workflows, Acute3D’s industrial-level accuracy and unlimited scalability are making it a preferred technology for UAV manufacturers and professionals around the world.
Process Safety and Risk Management
AssetWise APM V7.3 the enhanced version of Bentley’s asset performance management (APM) offering – an all-in-one analysis and information management software platform for asset reliability and asset integrity – now also advances process safety.
Alan Kiraly, Bentley senior vice president, server products, said, “Our AssetWise APM V7.3 meets the demanding requirements of reliability, integrity, safety, and maintenance managers and engineers in industries ranging from oil and gas, petrochemical, and mining and metals to power generation and other utilities. The software ensures assets are safe and reliable and that they are inspected and maintained to reduce or eliminate risk. Users further benefit from the elimination of unexpected downtime, increased asset availability and utilization, reduced maintenance costs, and support for regulations and safety standards, including ISA 84, IEC 61511, IEC 61508, and IEC 61882.”
AssetWise APM V7.3’s new process safety features help users manage the integrity of safety systems and hazardous processes, thereby preventing failures and catastrophic incidents and keeping people, assets, and the environment safer. Capabilities include safety instrumented function (SIF) analysis, safety instrumented systems (SIS), safety integrity level (SIL) and safety provisions, overrides, and incidents. AssetWise APM V7.3 also provides version control and approval, the analysis of loss of containment scenarios, and the identification and assessment of risks at the system level, as well as for related assets (risk matrix).
