According to researchers at ARC Advisory Group, the workwide market for safety and critical control systems will grow to more than $1.5 billion by 2010.
Today, a majority of established process safety instrumented system (SIS) suppliers such as ABB, General Electric, Honeywell, Invensys, Rockwell Automation, Siemens and Yokogawa are also basic control system suppliers (BPCS). SIS suppliers that are not in the BPCS business include HIMA and ICS Triplex. Newcomers in this field include Emerson, RTP and MTL. But Emersons DeltaV SIS, which is closely integrated with their DeltaV control system and was first sold in late 2005, has yet to gain a significant market share. RTPs 2500 and MTLs SafetyNet have recently received approval from TUV for safety applications.
Europe, Middle East and Africa are the largest markets for safety systems, followed by Asia and North America. The North American market size is declining, whereas the Asian market, led by China and India, is growing rapidly. Most of the Asian market is growing much faster than Europe, but as the European market is much larger, it will take a number of years for the Asian market to catch up with Europe in size. In addition, the Japanese market for programmable safety systems remains very small, as manufacturers in Japan continue using relays or solid-state logic for safety protection.
Since the publication of IEC 61508 general safety standards and IEC 61511 and ANSI/ISA-84.00.01 process safety standards, manufacturers worldwide are becoming more knowledgeable about safety issues. They are now performing more thorough hazard and risk analysis and are looking for cost effective safety systems that protect them from their residual risks. This has led to an increase in demand for SIL 2 systems at the expense of SIL 3 systems.
