Nancy B. here, fielding the crisis balls while Walt's away. Sometimes the technology will let you down. Seems like gremlins are living in the electronics today. To all you folks on-site who were wondering where the post was, it wasn't Walt's fault. Honest!Now, with fingers crossed, here is Jim Murphy's presentation of this morning.
With a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University, Jim
learned process control working with Fisher Controls and Measurex systems at Eli Lilly and Company. After spending another 10 years as an application engineer for ABB and Foxboro, Jim returned to Eli Lilly and Company in the late 1990s. In his current role, Jim is charged with implementing automation solutions in a process development environment. Wireless is seen as a key strategy for the rapid deployment of portable processing equipment, and the flexible placement of campaign specific instrumentation. The Situation at Eli Lilly:
Corporate infrastructure group supports wireless extensions of business LAN for café-style VPN connectivity. An access token provides additional security to normal user authentication.
Traditional wireless solutions are utilized in warehousing.
Point-to-point wireless solutions are in place to communicate across geographic
boundaries within utility systems. Wireless is not utilized in manufacturing within control systems.
Investigations for RFID and asset management are ongoing. Nacer Hedroug, a Lilly associate, is a co-chair of the SP100 RFID SG.
Wireless access to business LAN is available in several of our conference rooms.Wireless infrastructure has been installed in our pilot plant to support future inprocess information collection (deployment is the same model as meeting room access).
Point-to-point wireless solutions regularly used connectivity between PAT, and hosting laptop devices. From time to time, rogue wireless access points are utilized that violate corporate security policies.
How We Got Here: Our Business Case
Our facility executes development and cGMP batches of early phase compounds.
Development information can be as important as the material being produced.
Our development scientists and engineers want more information, and fixed
installs of adequate instrumentation are not a viable solution. Ad hoc placement of various instruments is desirable.
More and more the process control group is being asked to provide integration
and monitoring capabilities for new and proposed portable unit operations
equipment. Our distributed control system is our focal point for integration with fixed processing equipment and connectivity to our process data historian.
The Pilot Plant covers three floors and has existing wireless access for an upcoming project that hasn't been completed yet.
Investigation of Alternatives:
To support the ad hoc deployment of single instruments, we have considered taking advantage of existing infrastructure for ad hoc instruments. There is existing,I/O bus wiring to mil-spec connectors in several work cells. Adding some combination of new wire, compatible I/O cards, and software in each work area is possible, but is does not meet our needs for all areas.
Fiber is in place today that could be used to provide Ethernet to almost every area, but is intended future DCS workstation replacements.
Our DCS requires workstation upgrades to be kept in a supportable state. The preliminary upgrades being conducted this year enable new I/O types to be incorporated into our system.The capability to connect via Ethernet to our PLCs and OPC connectivity gateways have created the most interest.
Use of existing wireless access points has been considered, but usage requires MAC address and port mapping via change control. Given the desired portability, this is not favored. Anticipated instruments are intended for development measurements, and are not considered mission critical. We can't justify re-running wires all around the plant for HART, so WirelessHART is considered a very viable option.
Connectivity to portable equipment will provide gateway for monitoring and data historian connectivity. A local HMI will be provided, and no control or event monitoring will be done via the DCS. No loop closure will take place over the wireless link.
As a pilot facility, we are a logical venue to trial new devices and applications.
Our Design:
Level 1 or level 0 wireless network
No possible way to hack into business LAN
Flexible multi-radio network appliance (12 - 15 required)
Wireless mesh with 5 GHz backhaul
Ethernet access (802.11b/g)
Instrument connectivity via 900 MHz Wireless HART
OPC and Ethernet I/O cards on DCS
Where are we today?
Our project has acceptance within the process control discipline, and among our users. Communication to IT infrastructure group has been tedious.
Fortunately the system owner is the same for the future application, the installed wireless hardware and our proposed industrial wireless network. A few documentation gaps remain, and we are working with our vendors and IT representatives to address outstanding issues.
Lessons learned:
-Begin the dialog with IT governance organizations early. We did not anticipate concerns around bandwidth protection and security of the installed system.
-Project consolidation opportunities are not always obvious.
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