How oil companies lead charge to open, secure, interoperable process control systems
In the process industries, end users face many similar forces: endoflife and obsolete equipment and facilities, increasingly mega and complex projects with evertightening deadlines, and unfortunately, some control suppliers unwilling to provide interoperable components and networking. Users have coped with these occupational hazards for decades, of course, but now they're compounded by tightening margins due to reduced energy prices from fracking and plentiful supplies of natural gas and oil.
“A lot of our systems are becoming obsolete, and we need to replace them and continue to add value. Traditional DCSs weren't solving our business problems, so in 2010, we began an R&D program and in 2014, we developed functional characteristics we could take to the process industry,” says Don Bartusiak, chief process control engineer at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co. (EMRE). “Our vision is a standards based, open, secure, interoperable process automation architecture, and we want to have instances of the system available for on-process use by 2021.”
Breaking the interoperability barrier.pdf