Process integration challenges

Being able to integrate continuous, batch and hybrid processing technology into an integrated control system with management, analytic and optimisation capabilities has largely eluded industry to date.

In a recent interview with What's New in Process Technology, Stephen Ryan and Mitchell Giles of GE Fanuc spoke about how newer embedded systems technology based on a more open architecture is set to enable integration. The following is an excerpt from the interview, which will appear in the October issue of WNIPT.

What do you see as the challenges facing the process industry today?

Stephen Ryan: I think a number of external challenges are facing us aside from actual industry trends. Globalisation is affecting everything — demographics, emerging economies and emerging infrastructures — and the infrastructure needs are changing with new environmental and specific industry regulations. There are many environmental trends, and there are also specific trends in technology. Not only industry standards that help build technology such as ISA, OPC, but also the standard off-the-shelf technology that is now available to allow us to do things in our hardware and software that we couldn't do when technology was more proprietary.

Mitchell Giles: There are also generational changes which are challenging the industry. You have a new generation of engineers coming through who were doing things like HTML in school — so the skills of the engineers of today are vastly different from what they were ten years ago. The same goes for the end-user community — they are also a different generation with different expectations. They have grown up with the web and expect that type of instant real-time data. There is a breaking down now of the security and cultural barriers between IT and manufacturing operations. I see integrated systems helping to break down these barriers by allowing the end-users to see the operation from an industrial systems point of view.

Along with that is the fact that the industry is losing specialisation at the same time. When I first got involved with this industry you would see guys who were instrument fitters — guys who specialised in instrumentation and that was all they ever did — but go there now and you won't find them, because they don't exist any more. Everyone is multi-tasking and multi-skilled. There used to be people who were the DCS engineer and that was all they did as well, but they don't exist now either. So people are looking for, and are more accepting of, technologies that are broader.

So, there must be a lot of opportunities that are being created by these types of issues as well?

Stephen Ryan: Yes, I think it's really creating a window, an environment that's allowing new technologies to come in. The vendor landscape is shifting, and the environmental and regulatory changes, and global supply chain issues — all these combined affect the kind of solution that customers are looking for.

Mitchell Giles: I think people have tried in the past to integrate technologies in hybrid processing situations. The technology they were trying to drive forward was not really capable of delivering what they were trying to achieve in data acquisition, particularly in the embedded space. I think this is a true advantage that more open system design can bring, and I think that it will revitalise the interest in what was promised but people couldn't deliver.

Do you think previous attempts were too early — that the technology wasn't really there yet?

Mitchell Giles: I think the technology was there, but what some people tried to do was to use proprietary technology, so they were trying to get technology to do things it was not designed to do. For example, if you look at a PLC, it is built with an ASIC chip which is designed to do certain things. For example trying to use a PLC in a hybrid processing situation where, in addition to continuous variables being monitored, they are also trying to control something where the sampling may be slow, like two seconds. Proprietary process controllers are not well suited to performing discrete control. Alternatively, if you've got a discrete controller, you can't beat it into submission to perform continuous process control. At GE Fanuc we have developed PAC controllers that provide the capability to perform discrete, process and motion control from a single control platform.

Stephen Ryan: We think it will create unprecedented flexibility to being able to use the same technology to control and monitor many different types of processes. This is something attempted in the past, but proprietary technology stood in the way.

So in the past people attempted to configure hybrid processing systems by using technologies that weren't truly suited to the task.

Mitchell Giles: If you look at it from a pure product lifecycle point of view, in essence what they were trying to do was extend the product lifecycle of an existing product, rather than start with a design which is meant to do what hybrid is all about — and that's what it comes down to. They were trying to squeeze more out of a mature product than what it was designed to do.

Stephen Ryan: Another way to think about it is whether you solve a problem without changing the way you think about things a little bit when the problem itself has changed. If you try to approach the new challenges with the old tool set or the old thinking, then you probably won't get there.