Jason Urso, Honeywell Process Solutions vice president for technology, displayed an entirely new alter ego, Super Urso—complete with cape and x-ray vision goggles—as he guided the Honeywell User Group 2008 crowd through a swooping and soaring vision of the technology roadmap Honeywell is following.
“The three pillars of the Honeywell vision are safety, reliability and efficiency. These are the pillars of operational excellence,” Urso said. “And the first of these is process safety.”
“We have a history of capturing new operational benefits while preserving intellectual property.” Honeywell’s ongoing commitment to life-cycle preservation and low total cost of ownership were highlights of Jason Urso’s wide-ranging tour of the company’s technology roadmap.
The next pillar is reliability, and Urso showed a feedback loop: “Design the process right, improve life-cycle maintenance, improve operational efficiency, design the process right…”
The last of these three pillars, Urso explained, is efficiency. To Honeywell, this means supply chain optimization, improving process efficiency, improving people efficiency and best practices. But how to do this? Honeywell’s answer is “I-MAC” or “integrated Main Automation Contractor.” By acting as the I-MAC, Honeywell believes it can deliver operational and business readiness on day one in three dimensions. The PKS process knowledge system provides a best-in-class platform, while Honeywell’s 8,000 people in over 90 countries provide the significant global people presence necessary. And Honeywell’s abilities in work process allow it to capture and re-use best practices.
The Grand Tour
From there, Super Urso leapt into the grand tour. Experion PKS, he said, “provides best-in-class platforms and applications with operations integration to optimize your business, not just your process.”
Experion PKS is the most modern DCS and is designed for continuous evolution, he said. It is designed to integrate all modern field networks including Foundation fieldbus, HART, Modbus, Profibus, DeviceNet, ControlNet and Honeywell’s own DE protocol. “And, importantly, Experion was designed to be secure from the ground up,” Urso said.
So Urso introduced Experion R310, the latest release of Experion PKS. The latest goodies include complete integration of Safety Manager R131, communications directly to C300 over fault-tolerant Ethernet and overseen by a single HMI—yet without the common-cause failure mode common to most integrated safety systems.
“R310 Batch Manager is a new era in tight integration of batch control in the control system. Batch Manager now runs in the C300 controller directly. This allows a faster batch with 80% reduction in phase translation time, higher reliability with a redundant controller and ease-of-use with common tools and HMI,” Urso said.
Then there’s the Peer Control Data Interface which allows a C300 to use Modbus to communicate with any Modbus TCP device over fault-tolerant Ethernet.
“R310 has more new capabilities,” Urso said, “like SimC300, which allows you to simulate your control strategies before you have your devices installed. Other new features include DISOE, permitting 1-millisecond sequence-of-events recording, alarm shelving and lower latency function blocks, and Wood Group-based turbine controls designed for the power industry.
“And then there’s wireless.” Specifically, Release R110 of OneWireless. “R110 is now standards-ready,” Urso said. “When SP100 is ratified, all we will need to do is to give you a software upgrade, and you will have ISA 100.11a-compliant wireless.”
The next release of Experion will be in 2010, and will include support for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, as well as Batch Manager extensions and some other nifty features.
Safety Manager R131
The next new product Urso detailed was Safety Manager R131. This is the safety system that is integrated with the Experion HMI, using C300 communication and including an update to a higher performance processor. “The most important update,” Urso said, “is the SIS tools and the PVST partial-stroke valve testing tools—and the certified experts to help you increase your layers of safety protection.”
Honeywell Process Solutions is partnering with Honeywell Life Safety to offer integrated fire-and-gas detection, a unique feature to Experion PKS. Honeywell Life Safety provides a full portfolio of sensors for flame and smoke, toxic gas, camera systems, sounders and beacons, all functioning through a single Experion human interface. In yet another layer of protection, Honeywell is partnering with other divisions to provide video surveillance, radar surveillance, access control and intrusion detection, all through a single common user interface, the Experion HMI.
The current release of Safety Manager supports HART and SafeNet SIL4. In future releases, remote I/O will be added, as will Foundation fieldbus SIS.
PHD
Moving higher in the supply chain, Urso turned to PHD, Honeywell’s process historian. “We’re introducing Uniformance Process Studio,” he announced, “with an entirely new engineering environment for the enterprise PHD historian. It is brand new, completely refreshed, web-based, with a drag-and-drop environment, and permits re-use of Experion graphics to run histories.”
In 2010, Honeywell will be transitioning to SQL server and will have new configuration tools, support for 64-bit servers and high-availability clustering.
The foundation on which we’ve based this business, Urso declared, is continuous evolution. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the TDC 3000, and all the way from PM I/O to C300, there is support, Urso said. “We have a history of capturing new operational benefits while preserving intellectual property all the way to the Experion operator station for TDC. “We will continue to support US and GUS graphics—GUS graphics have no EOL [end-of-life] either.”
“Frankly,” Urso said, “Honeywell has the lowest total cost of ownership for continuous evolution for any DCS. We have 30-plus years of life-cycle preservation. We can preserve your intellectual property, your control strategies and graphics. Where are the other guys?”
Field Solutions
Urso then turned to field solutions. “We continue to expand our instrumentation portfolio. We have expanded our private-label arrangement with Krohne to include radar level instruments. We acquired Enraf level instruments and provers. But Enraf also brought us terminal automation systems, blending systems, additive systems and the ability to work in that environment.”
In the demo room, Urso said, Honeywell is showing a new prototype of an Enraf radar transmitter using the OneWireless ISA100.11a network.
Operational efficiency was the next topic on Urso’s technology roadmap tour. For operational efficiency, Honeywell’s answer is UniSim. The integrated UniSim life cycle allows Honeywell customers to improve plant design and reduce change orders; conduct operator training; test and validate control strategies; validate HMI graphics and procedures; and bring advanced process control applications online faster with fewer commissioning problems and less step-testing.
UniSim new product introductions include Operations R320, which allows deployment of training over the corporate intranet, R310 integration and the integration of the UOP Master Models. Also included is Design 380, including vertical market support, with improved performance diagnostics and revision control.
In the most significant UniSim announcement, Urso revealed that the complete library of UOP Master Models was available to UniSim.
Turning to operator effectiveness, Urso urged the deployment of the single Experion HMI console as a foundation to allow common work practices running over multiple generations of DCS, safety and security systems, all the way to the enterprise. He urged migration to ASM graphics and operator training, with better alarm management using this Experion common interface. This, he said, has been shown to lead to 35% to 48% faster response time in critical situations.
Profit Suite R400
Urso then moved further up the value chain to the business systems. The next release of Profit Suite R400 (scheduled for late 2009 or early 2010) will have step-out, nonlinear control, UOP co-design, enhanced engineering visualization and improved monitoring and diagnostics.
On the pulp-and-paper solutions front, he announced the availability of three new sensors available in the fourth quarter of 2008: an extensional stiffness sensor, a fiber orientation sensor that controls fiber angle and sheet squareness, and a full spectrum IR sensor for thickness of multilayer plastics. Integrating the supply chain for pulp and paper, Urso noted that Experion QCS integration, including common interface and database, is scheduled for the 2009-2010 timeframe.
Moving over to maintenance effectiveness, Urso announced that Honeywell’s intention is to improve operations with better control and better operating limit management. “Operating out of range is a leading cause of poor asset performance,” he declared. Honeywell assists its customers to move to proactive maintenance by incorporating smart device management, equipment health monitoring, system health monitoring and collaboration using automated procedures and IntelaTrak PKS.
He shared Honeywell’s vision of a Maintenance Effectiveness Console, based on Honeywell’s Field Device Manager. In the next release, HART performance improvements and incorporation of multiplexed Profibus sensors will be seen, while in the further releases, R400 and R410, scheduled for next year and following, customers will see plant-wide scaleability and Foundation fieldbus diagnostics.
“What we’ve built is a single console for all maintenance needs, just like our Experion console is a single HMI for all control needs,” Urso said.
Finally turning to business excellence, Urso talked about Honeywell’s MES vision. “We are unlocking the business value in your company,” he said. Using a common MES platform, but with software optimized for industry verticals, such as BusinessFLEX, Optivision and POMS, Honeywell provides a common set of components for performance management, planning and scheduling, production management and value chain management. “Our vision is to improve visibility of information, adapt to changing business conditions, employ standards-based tools and lower your total cost of ownership.”
