As predicted at last autumns European User Group conference in Salzburg, Honeywell has announced new releases of Experion PKS and Safety Manager, marking a further stage in its migration towards the integrated end of the safety system debate and leaving Invensys Process Systems as the sole mainstream process automation vendor resisting the trend to ever-closer integration of its DCS (Distributed Control System) and, in its case Triconex, SIS (Safety Instrumented System) offerings.
Based on what it describes as a unique approach to balancing the integration of process control systems with critical safety systems, Honeywell claims the combined offering allows plant operators to coordinate process control, safety shutdown and fire and gas mitigation steps by enabling safety and process controllers to communicate directly with each other without depending on intermediate interfaces, such as PCs, and without compromising operations security or data integrity. Safety and fire-and-gas information, such as pre-shutdown alerts, are now passed directly to operators via a common display, providing them with plant-wide SIS point data, diagnostics and system information, as well as alarms and events, operator displays and sequence-of-events information.
