Leveraging Control System Evolution for Plant and Personnel Efficiency

With advancing technology, plant-based automated control systems (ACS) eventually reaches the end of its useful life and an upgrade is required. ACS upgrades can be driven by reliability issues, system expansion limitations, or advanced networking security standards to name a few. Within an automated control system platform, there are several layers of automated resources, the enterprise/business level, the manufacturing execution system (MES)/operator control level, the controller level, and the device/instrumentation level. Each of the resource layers have an ideal lifecycle window that is tied to the evolution of the vendor system or hardware that is being utilized for automation. While the device/instrumentation level resources may have a longer life cycle, the enterprise or business level resources have a shorter life cycle due to a more frequent update timeline of vendor software and systems support. Recent patterns for increased connectivity demand on the enterprise level for analytical analysis coupled with demands for advanced networking security standards have accelerated the enterprise/business level's evolution. Inherently, these demands for connectivity have put a strain on the lower MES/operator and controller resource levels of the control system to gather and process this required field information. But these demands are not only limited to the ACS components as the plant must maintain a technical staff outside of a traditional IT department to support the new software and hardware systems. This paper describes the levels within an automated control system and how a management team can leverage the evolution of the control system in the plant to meet the growing demands of the enterprise level while also raising the level of technical aptitude of plant employees required to support the modern system design. It will describe the benefits of giving plant operators access to enhanced process information to increase plant reliability and using web-based tools to improve efficiency of plant electrical and maintenance teams. It will describe how modern networking components can utilized to identify failures without requiring a technician to be exposed to process or electrical hazards. The examples included in the paper show how the evolution within a control system have an impact on more than just the data the enterprise level receives.