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GAMBICA VIEWPOINT
Taking the open road
In the third of Gambica’s exclusive columns for
Drives & Controls, the organisation looks at how open
communications are giving manufacturers the flexibility to
deal with today’s challenges.
Businesses across a broad spectrum of industries are looking to
deploy integrated, cost-effective automation solutions that link the
plant floor to the rest of the enterprise. As well as providing control,
this trend is being driven by the need to access plant floor process
and equipment remotely for process status and diagnosis reports,
asset management, and quality control – and to improve overall
operational efficiency.
Added to this is the need to provide clear migration paths from
installed legacy systems, while at the same time ensuring futureproof
architectures that support the broadest range of best-in-class
products with easy interoperability to solve demanding control
applications and, most importantly, are not restricted to proprietary
or vendor-specific solutions.
As we approach the end of the first decade of the new
millennium, the explosion of the Internet and the development of
Internet Protocol (IP) based services in our daily lives, as well as the
arrival of a new generation of decision-makers familiar with these
high-tech solutions, has resulted in a growing acceptance and
expectation that these new technologies will be applied to enhance
and improve industrial and process applications.
As a result, the combination of open Ethernet technology and
Web services, along with other open industry standards for software
and device integration – such as FDT/DTM technology – is changing
the face of industrial and process control.
FDT (Field Device Tool) technology standardises the
communication and configuration interface between field devices
and host systems. It provides a common environment for accessing
a device’s features, so they can be configured, operated, and
maintained via a standardised user interface, regardless of the
device type or supplier, or the communication protocol.
FDT closes the fieldbus gap by providing a standard way for
device vendors to create user interfaces for advanced device
management. It allows device manufacturers to install a single DTM
(Device Type Manager) driver to use a device with multiple
Windows-based software products, such as asset management, PLC
programming, and device configuration and parameterisation
programs. FDT provides a workspace environment for the DTMs to
be configured, and a method for communicating between PCs and
field devices.
In the not-too-distant past – and, in many cases, still today – the
way to integrate control equipment with enterprise systems would
involve a combination of multiple proprietary technologies. Control,
I/O and device networks would exist separately and use different
network and fieldbus technologies, while sensor and actuator
connections still relied heavily on hard wiring, with its cabling and
installation costs. To read data from low-level devices required the
data to be “transformed” at each layer – from bits to bytes, bytes to
data, and then data to information. This traditional approach puts a
heavy burden on the automation controller and on Scada
applications.
Simple, open technology standards are the best way to foster the
emergence of new, more effective applications. Collaboration with
international standards organisations, such as the IEC and ISO, plus
groups such as the Zigbee Alliance, FDT Group, OPC Foundation
and ODVA, are essential for this to happen.
The great advantage of using open standards – and, in particular,
Ethernet-based networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) suite – is
that they are essentially neutral to higher-level protocols. This means
that they can be a part of a platform to connect diverse systems via
modern methods such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
Simple, open technology
standards are the best way
to foster the emergence of new,
more effective applications.
Although normally associated with the business processing
environment, SOAs are fundamental to Microsoft’s .Net framework
and provide a unified programming model for rapidly building
service-oriented applications that communicate across the Web and
the enterprise. Other major software developers, such as IBM, BEA,
Sun, HP, Oracle and SAP, are moving in a similar direction.
The challenges faced by today’s manufacturing and process
industries have been compounded by the volatile state of the
global economy. In this environment, the demands on the control
system go beyond functional and regulatory performance. It
becomes a tool to not only to manage the plant, but also to reduce
energy consumption, to cut costs and emissions, and to provide
quick and precise information from the field to the enterprise,
supporting both production and business decisions.
Today’s challenges require control systems that are not only easy
to engineer and maintain, but that also deliver a clear picture about
what is happening in the process, regardless of the application.
Control systems must be flexible enough to be tailored to meet the
needs of all types of process including discrete, batch, continuous
and safety (or any combination of these) and be capable of
integrating easily with energy management and third-party devices.