As today’s technical shifts and aftershocks get faster and more complex, a little friendly assistance and expert advice offer some much-appreciated relief. These were the overall benefits promised by a host of solutions presented during the Honeywell Users Group EMEA 2025 this week at the Hague in the Netherlands.
“The future of plant operations consists of increasingly autonomous processes with centralized management and infrastructures that are monitored for you across enterprises, production that’s prioritized, and decisions that are supported by transforming controls and operations,” said Jason Urso, CTO industrial automation at Honeywell.
“We’re accomplishing this with Honeywell Digital Cognition, which moves the control systems from simply executing operator commands to being an expert partner, giving operators better data visualization and guidance, and letting the least-experienced staffers work like their most experienced colleagues.”
Just as sensors and automation let vehicles perform parallel parking for drivers, Urso reported that similar solutions can take over infrequent tasks in process facilities, allow them to operate closer to limits, and maintain greater profitability. “This is what happens with Honeywell Digital Cognition,” added Urso. “It combines human and machine expertise, so every day of production can be the best day.”
Tuning into the human loop
To achieve this ideal state of production, Urso reported that two leaps are required:
- Transforming control systems from only participating in steady-state operations to increasingly participate in transient tasks as well; and,
- Transforming industrial operations by continuing to depend on human expertise, while also standardizing procedures to reduce performance variabilities and inefficiencies.
“Moving to flawless operations depends on people supervising both steady-state and transient operations, but Experion’s cognitive ability combines users’ experiences with its software-based reasoning engine to interpret data and generate recommendations,” explained Urso. “These capabilities also work with our digital twin tools and Honeywell Forge platform. However, process control is just one aspect of Honeywell Digital Cognition because it can also perform planning, operations, maintenance and reliability functions, as well as collaborate with our UOP software and domain expertise.”
Beyond simply running equipment, Urso reported that Honeywell Digital Cognition’s next assignment is augmenting the “human control loop” by using historical data to further reduce variability and increase standardized performance. “Industrial autonomy is within reach, including strategies about what to make and when, and what to fix and when,” said Urso.
“Honeywell can bring to bear plant-based cognition functions such as process optimization, asset performance management and equipment degradation monitoring, as well as a Production Intelligence reasoning engine. These tools help users decide which actions to take. It’s like having the best operator at work all the time. It turns data into insights and insights into actions.”
Agents you can talk to
To acquire the knowledge that makes insights and actions possible, Peter Davis, senior engineering director at Honeywell, and Graeme Laycock, user experience (UX) design director at Honeywell, demonstrated its Experion Cognition Autonomous Operations Assistant software that goes beyond the usual alerts to determine situational status, gauge criticality, and provide more intelligent guidance. It consists of:
- Using knowledge-capture tools, to harvest site documents, subject matter expert (SME) know how, business rules and other sources to ingest more recent input.
- Developing knowledge graphs that span structured and unstructured data, domain and expert knowledge, and plant and causal models.
- Building artificial intelligence (AI) agents to carry out tasks, such as model-predictive control, causal AI, reinforcement learning (RL), small language models (SLM), generative AI and control system tasks.
“Experion Cognition Autonomous Operations Assistant is like having an additional person sitting beside you to consult with and help make better decisions,” explained Davis. “It can help with all the jobs that operators do, including seeking anomalies, responding to production issues, and drafting shift reports.”
For instance, the left side of Experion Cognition Autonomous Operations Assistant’s interface lists many of the agents for performing predictive functions or recommended actions, while the right side has a live chat space that users can communicate with directly to request searches or assign specific tasks, and receive audio and text responses.
“Users can even tell their Experion Cognition Assistant exactly what they want, such as reducing a feed rate if a certain temperature is reached,” explained Laycock. “The Assistant asks users to confirm what action they want to take, and if they want alerts, then looks for subsequent patterns, capturing activity and abnormal situations in the shift log. AI agents can also mine this data later, and operators can query it to automate loop tuning, prioritize critical issues, and identify limits in place that may have been forgotten about.
“Advanced process control (APC) has always been useful, but having tools like a Plantwide Optimizer agent can adjust faster for optimal performance and give users a prioritized recommendations list that show the value of each adjustment.”
Prime time for digitalization
To spread Honeywell Digital Cognition’s capabilities among a wider radius of remote and enterprise users and applications, the company also demonstrated its Digital Prime platform that’s delivered via its Honeywell Forge service. It’s designed to operate at enterprise-scale levels, provide greater insights, and accomplish users’ performance goals more quickly. The main capabilities of Digital Prime Suite include:
- Digital systems insights,
- Enabled services,
- Digital twins,
- Migration solutions, and
- Cybersecurity offerings.
To deliver these results, Digital Prime’s primary operating functions include:
- Visualization,
- Data analytics,
- Reporting,
- Benchmarking, and
- Recommendations.
“Digital Prime allows users to see enterprise views starting at a single site, and then expand them to manage tasks like their cybersecurity posture at all their sites,” said Anand Vishnubhotla, CTO for Honeywell Process Solutions.
Elena Mayor, portfolio management director at Honeywell, added that Digital Prime also contextualizes site data to generate better insights and recommendations, such as potential instabilities, applications that have stopped running, and potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
“Many customers are dealing with a lack of onsite experts, and tools like Digital Prime can address those skills gaps,” said Mayor. “Solutions like Honeywell’s Solution Enhancement Support Program (SESP), Assurance 360 outcomes-based service program, cybersecurity solutions, and Level 3 and Level 4 monitoring tools are all in the same system. However, it used to take weeks to gather and assemble all their data and develop pros and cons about what decisions to make. Now, we can use Digital Prime at the enterprise level, and immediately show results like a cybersecurity score, quickly drill down to examine assets and potential vulnerabilities, and get recommendations about what to do about them.
“Digital Prime’s functions typically include showing where new equipment is needed, what equipment may needs support, what needs to be migrated, and what software needs to be updated. This means we can see all these data flows together, which also makes it easier to plan an upgrade because we can see what KPIs are out of alignment.”
Seeing into cybersecurity
Urso reported that users are also benefiting from cybersecurity tools that are increasingly digitalized and able to make use of Honeywell‘s various cognitive capabilities. “Cyber-threats aren’t getting any easier. OT systems are looking a lot more like IT.” said Urso. “All these additional connections mean more potential vulnerabilities. Plus, AI lets anyone act like a hacker.”
Consequently, Honeywell also recently introduced its Cyber Insights program to monitor all the devices on a user’s network, automate the collection of OT device inventory information, and identify cyber-threats lurking on networks. To help users show they’re complying with cybersecurity rules where they might have previously needed an audit, the company also introduced Honeywell Cyber Watch, which offers compliance support for ISA/IEC 62443, NIS 2, NEEC-CIP and custom compliance frameworks. This allows Honeywell’s connected devices to:
- Interpret hazards,
- Identify locations,
- Detail environmental conditions, and
- Provide recommended actions.
“This input can also help Honeywell-enabled security operations centers (SOCs) identify cyber-threats, and even misdirect potential cyber-attackers,” added Urso. “We’re learning that proactive cyber-defenses can use AI and machine learning (ML) tools to contain cyber-attacks and help detect, mitigate and recover from them.”
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