If one were to create a word cloud of terms that have dramatically increased in use since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “uncertain” and “challenging” would be prime candidates for the largest font. But in the context of industrial operations—and the systems that control them—“resilience” would likely make the list as well.
Six months ago, we were more likely to emphasize agility and flexibility of production systems—stressing the ability of production systems to respond to rapidly changing market conditions and consumer demands. But with the pandemic, that focus has shifted to resilience, a quality that embraces both agility and flexibility, but with an added overtone of responsiveness to potentially damaging or even disastrous events. Indeed, in much of our rhetoric, resilience has been elevated to join safety, productivity and sustainability as the ultimate attributes of best-in-class operations.
For example, at the recent Hannover Messe Digital Days virtual event on July 17, 2020, the head of the organizing committee of the Global Manufacturing and Industrialization Summit (GMIS), singled out resilience, flexibility and sustainability as the three most important factors for any manufacturer in the coming decade. Badr Al-Olama, who also heads the aerospace division of the UAE’s Mubadala Investment Co., stressed the importance of embracing the digital technologies representative of the fourth industrial revolution in order to strengthen global value chains, localize capabilities and maintain operations.
Similarly, the authors of a recent Boston Consulting Group study entitled “The Digital Path to Business Reliance,” tagged resilience as the key driver of value during times of stress. “Some companies outperform their peers during downturns while many others lose ground or don’t survive,” the authors wrote. “In the past four downturns since 1985, about one in seven companies increased both sales growth rate and profit margins. As the world of business grows increasingly uncertain and volatile, companies that have purposefully developed capabilities to tackle ambiguity and unpredictability are most likely to thrive,” conclude the authors.
New meaning for system resilience
In the process control realm, users have long had the option of control system redundancy to help ensure the continuity of their operations. And while hot standbys are indeed effective at preventing process downtime due to a controller failure, they’re not a very effective solution from a resource allocation perspective, and so are only applied to a plant’s most critical operations.
Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) is leading the way to more scaleably resilient distributed control systems with the R520 release of its Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS), scheduled for later this year. The company’s Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) platform has effectively severed the traditional dependency between system input/output (I/O) and a particular controller, meaning that any controller can interact directly with any I/O.
R520 will leverage this capability further, allowing users to automatically assign control functions to various controllers, explained Brian Reynolds, HPS senior director of engineering, in a keynote presentation during the company’s Virtual Technology event in June. Perhaps most importantly, it will allow control tasks to be automatically transitioned to any other controller with available compute resources in the case of a controller failure. “It allows process control to be more resilient than before, and facilitates on-process migration as well,” Reynolds added. “In the future, we envision a mix of virtual and embedded controllers—multiple generations all running together in a virtual environment.”
Hmm. Scaleable, automatic protection against controller failures, plus the ability to spin up new system capabilities without interrupting the process. Sounds pretty resilient to me.
