When modernizing existing plants with pervasive sensing most of the new data from the large number of wireless sensors is not used for safety and control. Therefore only a portion of the data goes to the operators in the control room. Most of the new data goes to maintenance and reliability engineers, the energy manager, and the HS&E officer which all sit in offices beyond the control room. Data for these disciplines is not delivered through the DCS, but through the existing plant historian or asset management system. That is, plant modernization can be accomplished without replacing the existing control system. As a result plants can enjoy increased reliability, lower maintenance cost, shorter turnarounds, higher energy efficiency, and reduced HS&E risk.
See the article “beyond the control room” on page 10 of Control Engineering Asia:
http://www.ceasiamag.com/ebook/1407.asp
I’d be keen to hear from more end users about their view using wireless transmitters for these purposes and about integrating the data directly to the historian without loading the DCS. Apart from the various applications mentioned in the article, what other applications do you see where the data would be presented to other disciplines through the historian rather than to operators through the DCS.
Hi,
We have a customer here in Finland that have added wireless THUMB:s to all of the MiMo:s and some other "smarter" transmitters.
They have the old factories and are also building new plants were they also added the THUMB:s .
The transmitters are hardwired to the control system for control and supervision and the wireless is sending all of the data to the maintenace departement.
To have a configuration like this really helps maintenace to supervise all of the equipment, they can directly see all of the transmitters from their own computer to recognize were a possible problem could be.
If you have configurated alarms in AMS then you will get the alarm from the transmitter as soon as they happen.
Also if the control room calls and says that we have something strange with one of the measurements, the maintenace can directly connect to the meter and take a look at it.
This will speed things up because the service guy don´t have to figure out were the meter is physiccally located at the factory, drive to the plant with all of the tools and at the worst case cause some kind of
incident when opening the transmitter and connecting the handhels communicator in possible hazardous areas.
It's not reccomended that you feed to much information to the plant operators, they are trained to run the process not to analyze meter data.
From my experience the customer have been very satisfied with this configuration and are adding it to all possible places.
Niklas Flykt
Klinkmann Oy
Key Account Manager safety products
nikfly@gmail.com
In reply to Niklas Flykt:
Dear Niklas, I totally agree that you flood the operators (in the control room) with too much inforamation. Yours is a very good example of information that should go "beyond the control room" to other disciplines. The article gives other examples of this.
Further information on this can be found in the diagnostics tutorials and guides found here:
www.eddl.org/.../DeviceDiagnostics.aspx
There is also another article here on NAMUR NE107
www.ceasiamag.com/.../10440
In reply to Jonas Berge:
Dear Jonas,
Some wise guy sometime told me that there had been a study of how many different things a person can actually control at the same moment.
I learned that the reccomendation is maximum 6-7 objects in one screen, if there is more then you can´t fullly pay attention to everything.
Yes. I heard that same number. This is why it is important to send operations informations to operators (in the control room) and other information to to other people such as maintenance, reliability engineers, energy manager, HS&E officer etc. that sit in other offices beyond the control room. The operators get their data on the DCS while the other disiplines get their data from the asset management system (AMS) or through the historian. This way each person only get a small amount of information to work with, only the data relevant to them, they are not flooded in the information not valuable to them.
The HTML version of the "beyond the control room" article about the data which is sent not to the operators at the DCS console in the control room, but about the data for improving reliability, maintenance productivity, energy efficiency, and reducing HS&E risk - data sent to the asset management system and plant historian for display to maintenance and reliability engineers, energy managers, and HS&E officers is now available:
www.ceasiamag.com/.../10658