If the Process Control vendor world was one great big
outdoor rock concert, Honeywell would have to be U2.
Both are absolutely huge and supremely confident,
almost everyone is familiar with their line-up, most
people take a liking to them, but not everyone cares for
their bold strut or their particular brand of politics. The
enduring parallel between the two, however, is that both
redefine themselves through constant innovation to stay
relevant within rapidly changing industries.
U2 has created ground-breaking music over a generation,
while Honeywell has engineered exceptional control
systems for decades. The flip side of this popularity is
that for all of the positives of Honeywell’s popular DCS,
their hardware tends to get along with other vendor’s
hardware about as well as Bono gets along with the
World Trade Organization. Thankfully, in the past year, a
solution has emerged for tightly integrating the Honeywell
DCS into a broader control architecture. Matrikon OPC
Server connectivity now provides the link for those who
‘still haven’t found what we’re looking for’.
The prominence of the Honeywell DCS is one of the
enduring success stories of the Worldwide process control
industry. From its earliest days of closed loop controllers
through to the more organized circa-1970’s TDC 2000
which evolved into the TotalPlant Solution (TPS)/TDC
3000 and beyond with the introduction of Experion
PKS in the past few years, Honeywell hardware is the
cornerstone of control strategy for as many as 13,000
industrial sites around the world. With the Experion
system, Honeywell has proven that they can create a
robust, scalable, universal connectivity platform using
OPC. Their connectivity legacy is another matter all
together.
Throughout its life cycle, the complexity of Honeywell
DCS hardware has been a double-edged sword. On the
one hand, it was so all encompassing and self contained
that it was capable of performing a wide array of tasks
extremely well without outside interference. On the other
hand, because it wanted to go it alone, other control
systems running in a plant could not interact with it very
well. Integrating separate control hardware and software
assets with a Honeywell system became a frustratingly
futile exercise.
She Moves In Mysterious Ways
The Honeywell TDC 3000 and its predecessor the TDC
2000 were a distributed control system made up of a
wild herd of component modules. An array of VMS boxes,
Network interface modules, Hiway gateways, distributed
databases, AxM application modules and other flavours
of UNIX-driven Universal Stations dotted its hardware
landscape.
Each component was a proprietary black box that did
not give up its secrets easily. All of them floated around
on a nebulous, proprietary backbone called the Local
Control Network (LCN), which was off limits to any
external connections. When Windows began to emerge
as a universal computing platform, the controlling
software migrated to PCs in the form of Global User
Stations (GUS), which were no less mysterious. Each of
these new GUS machines powered by Windows NT and
then Windows 2000 housed Honeywell software and a
specialized communication card to hook them into the
LCN. Honeywell placed strict controls on what could be
run on the GUS and how the LCN could be accessed, with
offenders facing daunting penalties for any violations
along the way.
As engineers worked with the assortment of DCSs of that
era, they came to realize that as good as any of them
were on their own, there was no single, independent
system that could do everything a plant required. As
companies began selecting best-of-breed applications
external to the DCS, the broadened control structure
had to be a lot more flexible in the way that it shared
information. In any given refinery, chemical plant or mine
site, completely unrelated vendors could be selected
for PLCs, Historians, Alarm Systems, Advanced Control,
Planning and Scheduling, Safety Systems, Loop Tuning
and any other control task under the sun. In an era when
multinational corporations acquired more and more sites
with wildly differing control systems and management
structures, the demand was that all of these systems
must work together without ripping out hardware they
had already paid good money for.
Along the way, people began asking their control system
vendors why all of these systems couldn’t interoperate
as a unified system to streamline a plant-wide operation.
When this control technology revolution began giving
power to the people who demanded productivity through
interconnectivity, Honeywell acquiesced by offering
a TPS Server on a Honeywell Application Processing
Platform. This offered a tantalizingly limited view into the
machinations of the TDC 3000 world below. The trickle of
information did little to establish a platform for integrated
optimization or create a base for informed business
decisions.
Even Better Than The Real Thing
In the last year, a Matrikon OPC solution has emerged
that has enabled the Honeywell DCS to take its rightful
place as the cornerstone of a unified plant control
structure. The universal connectivity of the OPC
communication standard has become the de-facto answer
to the question of moving data between control hardware
and software applications. Once a hardware system is
fitted with a properly written, optimized, and standardscompliant
OPC Server deployed using proper engineering
practices, the myriad of applications that boast OPC
Client connectivity have the DCS data at their finger
tips, ready to be accessed. Having standard and open
communication to the Honeywell hardware has opened a
whole new realm of improved functionality.
There are a number of reasons why the Matrikon OPC
Server for TotalPlant Solution (TPS) is emerging as the
communication standard of choice for the TDC 3000.
When a site uses the Matrikon OPC Server connected to
the Honeywell GUS, all of the strange proprietary wirings,
single paths of failure, museum piece computers and
weird network cards go away.
The site can operate its Honeywell communication on
the plant network: a stable, speedy, well known Ethernet
base. It brings with it the full benefit of pre-installed
firewalls, redundant Ethernet cards, redundant networks
and can dictate access using Windows authentication. Using Windows security as opposed to a number of aging UNIX access methods, the system can lock down
its access permissions, keeping the system safely under
an engineering group’s control. In addition, established
IT tools from people like HP and Cisco can be used to
monitor network traffic, and there are a number of
utilities to make sure that the Windows PCs have a
manageable load and redundancy through clustering
and redundant hardware. Systems that were installed 10
years ago can now have all the benefits that exist in the
most up-to-date systems.
It’s a Beautiful Day
By opening the doors to the closed system through
universal OPC Server connectivity, companies have
already seen the benefits of this information availability.
When a chemical processing facility in Malaysia noticed
an abnormally high failure rate and unscheduled down
time with their continuous distillation equipment, they
purchased an analysis package with the aim of providing
rationalization of the large volume of alarms they were
seeing. A reliable connection was required to their
Honeywell DCS where the alarms and events were held.
The Matrikon OPC Server for Honeywell TPS was
employed to provide access to those alarms which
already existed in the DCS. Once that information path
was established and the system began providing real
benefits, they looked around to other areas that they
could also improve.
An enterprise historian was providing real-time event
management, retrieval and deep archiving of their
volumes of data. The data was used for scalable
management of relevant variables and events. Because
the process historian resided on a separate network from
the plant process control network, archiving TDC 3000
data had always been a frustrating exercise that required
reading data through an archaic VAX collector. Using the
new OPC communication capability, the Ethernet network
domains were securely bridged, allowing the historian to
make safe and encrypted reads into the DCS.
At a large mine site in Australia, two coal washing areas
in a preparation plant were each being controlled by
a Honeywell LCN. When a decision was made to unite
the information of the areas to increase the accuracy
of raw material inventory calculations, a solution was
sought out to establish that connection. The data sharing
needed to be accomplished without a complicated
equipment change. The site engineers were loathe to add
another chunk of communication hardware or additional
computers to a system that was stable and in production.
The site chose two Matrikon OPC Servers for TPS and
an OPC Data Manager to provide secure read and
write access between the two. The applications were
run on existing computers and handled the complete
data transfer without any adverse effects on loading.
In addition, a number of benefits, both expected and
unexpected, were realized.
The tags in the OPC Servers on both LCNs did not
need to be configured manually. The tag database was
configured automatically using the existing Honeywell
tag configuration service. This updated whenever
either of the TDC 3000 LCN databases changed.
Beyond the technical economies, the standardized
OPC communication also provided visibility at the site
management level. A selection of TDC 3000 data could
be accessed by the Process Information Network through
existing firewalls using OPC Tunnelling technology.
The result was that planning and scheduling activities
that had previously been done by a slow, painstakingly
manual exercise could be automated and populated with
real-time DCS data. The savings to the organization
was significant, and all of it was done by leveraging the
control systems that the mine site already had.
We’ve seen rock bands and process control systems come
and go. The best of both tend to survive by adapting and
improving over time to stay relevant. U2 stays popular
by updating their sound so that it attracts new fans and
keeps their old fans happy with their consistent quality.
Good control hardware vendors need to change with the
times too, and must take care of their old customers
while bringing in new ones.
By opening up the Honeywell DCS with OPC, it can be
augmented with all of the new OPC-enabled historians,
web clients, ERP, security and advanced process control
applications available out there, extending the life of
hardware already in production. In both cases, it’s sweet
music to the ears.
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