In the age of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0, manufacturing firms require practical tools to integrate new digital technologies and relate them in unprecedented ways. They look for solutions where one system can communicate transparently with another, offering integration and decision support. The goal is to create intelligent, connected and capable plants and factories.
Today, many solutions are available to take advantage of process automation field device information across the enterprise—from the plant floor to the cloud.
To deliver on the promise of IIoT and Industrie 4.0, field device information must be understood by many higher-level applications. It must be structured to allow comparisons and analytics independent of the supplier and protocol. To this end, consortiums like the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) and Europe’s NAMUR organization are actively producing recommendations for next-generation open process automation system architectures.
FieldComm Group’s Plant of the Year recipient, Mangalore Refining and Petrochemical Limited, has utilized best practices in putting digitalization to work. The facility is leveraging stranded data from HART field devices, adding new data through WirelessHART, and expanding its application of FOUNDATION Fieldbus. This has resulted in millions in savings by shifting unplanned maintenance to planned activities, avoiding failures and providing efficiency improvements in commissioning and maintenance.
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