No wants to be ordered around, but everyone usually appreciates some friendly advice—especially if it’s presented in a genuinely kind and generous way. Likewise, many of today’s automobiles are sensing, analyzing and alerting drivers about potentially unsafe actions, or even preventively slowing cars down when necessary.
“What if we could do the same for plant operations? What if we could help staff run closer to performance limits for longer periods, while also assisting with transient operations, and assuring flawless startups, shutdowns, and even grade changes?” asked Jason Urso, CTO Industrial Automation at Honeywell Process Solutions. “Well, it's not only possible. It's actually happening.”
During his keynote on the opening day of Honeywell User Group 2025 in San Antonio, Urso reported that Digital Cognition is his company’s name for this advisory approach. “It turns process control from something to be commanded into something users can collaborate with,” explained Urso. “This guidance lets and newest and least experienced people in a plant work like the most experienced and makes every day of production the best day.”
Distributing expertise
To achieve this idyllic vision of process operations, Urso reported that two changes must happen: control systems must transform themselves, and automation must be used to help with decision-making in different ways than it has before.
Over the past 50 years, as panel-based controls digitalized, operators learned to run effectively during steady-state periods. However, any situations outside of that, and users are deluged with lots of alarms and data that must be translated into action. Consequently, operations still rely on human experts, and running flawlessly all the time and in all conditions requires technology that delivers recommendations based on best practices. Honeywell calls this Experion Cognition. Its three parts include:
- An intelligent interface and user experience that goes beyond simply presenting data, and moves up to making recommendations;
- A reasoning engine that serves as the intelligence behind the human interface. It runs analytics that combine process digital twins and AI to provide a foundation for digital cognition; and
- Honeywell Forge Connectivity software that taps Honeywell expertise.
“These steps show that control is just one aspect of operations, so this second technology evolution must influence a broader set of functions beyond the board operator to have overall plant operations run with maximum throughput, yield and reliability,” explained Urso. “Digital cognition must play a role beyond the control system, and assist multiple disciplines, including planning, scheduling, operations, maintenance and reliability. Digital Cognition should allow them to take the best action every time, and apply their decisions in an automated way back through the control system to restore a closed-loop response with operations.”
Where last-generation operations used control loops to manage plant equipment, Urso added most of their problems were largely resolved by using traditional automation. “Now is the time to solve the next level of control—human control that's presently carried out by multiple disciplines applying their domain knowledge at each facility,” he said. “We need to address the human control loop by modeling the cognitive processes our experts developed over years and decades, which they use to make the best decisions every day.”
This thoughtful approach for facilities is called Plant Cognition, and its three features are:
- Plantwide Optimizer for what to manufacture when;
- Asset Performance Manager for what to repair and when, and where to send equipment insights: and
- Production Intelligence that also uses a reasoning engine to evaluate decisions about actions.
Harness the human loop
To solve persistent problems like skill shortages, operator turnover and limited access to best practices, Urso turned to two of Honeywell’s longtime experts: Peter Davis, senior engineering director, and Graeme Laycock, user experience director.
“They can use Experion Operations Assistant to help resolve alarms quickly and efficiently,” explained Laycock. “It identifies what alarms are occurring, where, and what’s the guidance for them.”
Davis added that Experion Operations Assistant has been streamlined by AI, letting it turn queries into spoken responses. “It automatically ingests various data sources to create what we call a plant knowledge graph of the plant’s relationships,” explained Davis. “Next, an AI model is trained on stock information, so it can identify potential responses, and lastly, an embedded generative AI (genAI) language model turns those responses into natural-language answers.”
Laycock and Davis added that Honeywell’s vision for an encore is Autonomous Operations Assistant, which is expected to augment operations by giving each console its own virtual digital assistant, so the human users can better understand what actions they’re taking and why.
“It will be like having someone sitting next to you, but it will be a set of software-based agents, which can monitor and perform actions,” says Laycock. “Autonomous Operations Assistant will be a voice-activated, virtual assistant that will allow users to chat with it.”
Center-cut collaboration
To extend Digital Cognition’s initial gains, Urso was joined by two more colleagues: Anand Vishnubhotla, CTO, Honeywell Process Solutions, and Cindy Bloodgood, senior offering management director. They showed how Honeywell’s Digital Prime software platform can serve enterprise-scale applications, provide more performance insights, and achieve performance outcomes for users even more quickly. It’s suite combines:
- Digital systems insights,
- Enabled services,
- Digital twins,
- Integration solutions, and
- Cybersecurity offerings.
“Digital insights can be potential instabilities, applications that stopped running, or potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” said Bloodgood. “Digital Prime reveals them, recommends actions, and distributes approved actions across the enterprise and ecosystem of other platforms.”
Urso reported that Honeywell used a similar organization strategy to develop its Cyber Insights initiative that includes:
- Monitoring all the devices on each user’s network;
- Automatically collected OT device inventory data; and
- Identification of threats lurking in networks.
Cyber Insights is aided by Honeywell’s Cyber Watch program that supports the IEC 62443, NIS2 and NERC-CIP cybersecurity standards.
“Our latest connected cybersecurity devices interpret hazards, identify user locations and environmental conditions, and also provide recommended actions,” added Urso. “In addition, because Digital Cognition only works if it gets the knowledge it needs, we’re also relying on UOP for input, as well as process know-how from recent acquisitions like Air Products’ LNG process technology, Sundyne and Compressor Controls Corp.
“We can build on this knowledge, and it will be how control becomes an app for the processes it serves. It’s also how human knowledge will captured in digital forms, which can then be reused to tune models and perform other tasks.”
