At one with integration

“One thing every company discusses in light of industry challenges is business optimization. But few are achieving the level they’re capable of,” said Jason Urso, vice president of technology at Honeywell, during his presentation at the Honeywell Users Group in Phoenix. Urso emphasized the importance of oneness—in integration solutions that is.
Best-in-class companies actually focus on three areas: Process safety and security, operations excellence, and business agility. But they treat it as a technology problem, weeding together islands of automation to achieve a single solution. Yet when companies do this, they’ve really “created a complex solution, and the benefits degrade then go away entirely,” Urso said. “Then the cost of maintenance is higher, and overall you’ve created poor visibility when it comes to maintenance staff.”
Jason Urso, vice president of technology at Honeywell, talks technology on Monday during a presentation at the Honeywell Users Group in Phoenix.
Honeywell’s goal is to take a more holistic and integrated approach, “to enable you to sustain business optimization over your lifecycle. It is called One Honeywell, and it offers the full breadth to treat a problem, not a series of point solutions. “We help you get started by designing the process up front with integrated DCS and fire and gas solutions, to help you integrate throughout your lifecycle. Then you can improve your overall process throughput while driving down process incidents.”
Delivery of One Honeywell is through a main automation contractor program that builds on the traditional concept of delivering on time and on budget. “But we go one step beyond; we deliver with business readiness on day one,” he said.
“The Honeywell Experion Platform protects and preserves the install base and is designed to work with a wide variety of field networks,” he said. “The PCBI function block is integrated with our C300 controller and can speak over Ethernet to any device that supports the ModBus TCP standard.”
Security is also one of the goals behind Experion. “We built it [security] into the platform; we didn’t add it in later,” he said. The newest release for Experion is the Series C steam turbine control, which “allows us to achieve integration between DCS and steam turbine control with two modules—speed input I/O module and accelerated cycle time, achieving increased efficiency between boiler, controller, and process control at your facility.
The C200 E controller platform enhances C200 to support additional memory, bringing batch manager to the C200 controller for faster batch execution to improve production.
Other additions to the Experion experience are Experion HS and Experion LS—tailored for smaller systems in specific markets. Experion HS provides a small typical SCADA solution, and Experion LS is for smaller batch and process systems.
To further quality the importance of oneness, Urso described UniSim Lifecycle Solutions, which help users get started in overall plant design. “Honeywell designs out instabilities before you start putting steel in the ground,” he said, “and you can use these models to train your operators as well as to check out your control and safety strategies and validate procedures before units come online.”
Honeywell has also acquired Maxon and Callidus to improve their business in burners, flare systems, thermal oxidizers, and vapor control systems. “We can bring you a broad range of burner technology for best-in-class levels of efficiency for process heaters,” Urso said. As far as fire and gas detection devices go, “we can deliver flame, smoke, toxic gas, and a range of alarming devices.”
Urso described the importance of integrating fire and gas detection with a hypothetical gas leak situation, whereby Honeywell gas detectors can pick up and alert fire and gas platforms, which can communicate with emergency shutdown systems, which can isolate the toxic gas leak, then communicate directly to the Honeywell C300controller (upstream or downstream). And all this is overseen by a single Experion interface—another testimony to oneness. “That’s the kind of integration you can expect with the Honeywell family,” Urso said, “to help you improve overall safety because you can respond faster and more accurately.”
As part of a litany of new products, Urso extended the oneness theme with a safety angle by announcing a manual gauge reader to wirelessly integrate manual gages at a low cost, a valve position sensor for remote valve position monitoring (ideal for people who have multiple valves in field), and a flexline radar level gauge for accurate and reliable inventory control and custody transfer. “Best of all, this flexline radar level gauge is enabled for One Wireless so it can be deployed in your tank farms” for safety issues, he said.
And speaking of accuracy, human error accounts for almost half of the mistakes made in the process, so Honeywell has laid the foundation with Experion Human Interface, which is well integrated with ProfitSuite for blending and movement automation solutions “so you don’t purchase a collection of point solutions. Once you have common human interface in place, the next place to improve is operator response; look at operator graphics and alarming display. In an abnormal situation, ASM graphics will help the operator respond faster and with more precision. We can help your operators respond 48% faster and more precisely,” he said.
Because startups and shutdowns are occurring less frequently these days, operators are out of practice. “In our application called Procedural Operations, you can automate your procedures to reduce variables and move them closer to execution, even for the least experienced operator.”
—Ellen Fussell Policastro