Responses below were provided by the following ARC Advisory Group analysts:
- Dick Hill, Vice President & General Manager, Manufacturing Advisory Services
- Chantal Polsonetti, Vice President, Automation Consulting Team
- Dick Slansky, Sr. Analyst, Lean Manufacturing & Production Management Solutions
- Asish Ghosh, Vice President, Batch and Safety Systems
- Harry Forbes, Sr. Analyst, Industrial Networks & Wireless Solutions
- Larry O''Brien, Research Director, Strategic Process Automation Solutions
IEN: How can/will the sector answer industry demand for increased automation and flexibility?
Hill: The automation and controls segment of the market is becoming the key to achieving operational excellence. With the increased pressure on manufacturing enterprises to perform flawlessly every time a decision is made, while these decision points are coming more frequently, the need to have accurate, real-time cost-based information is essential. For the most part, the technology (hardware and software) to achieve this is ready. The services component is the current challenge, since many of the applications involve multiple supplier technologies and a great deal of custom engineering. ARC feels one of the needs for the future is the increased utilization of true international standards to make the custom engineering portion much less significant.
IEN: Will distributed control architectures continue to displace centralized controls?
Slansky: Overall, distributed control architectures will continue to be the direction. This is driven mainly by the optimization of manufacturing processes and the need for more agile, flexible automation systems and equipment. Manufacturers need to respond quickly to changing market demands with new product introductions. Centralized control systems will always make sense in some production environments, but distributed control offers attributes like autonomous control, better asset management (machine condition monitoring), and enables production floor information to be more readily accessed and moved to higher level production management systems.
IEN: What innovations are in store for equipment, systems, peripherals, and software (MEMS, MST, Nano, etc.)?
Ghosh: MEMS: Applications of Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) devices include accelerometer sensors in automobile airbags, blood pressure sensors in medical equipment, and sensors for military electronics. Despite this adoption, MEMS is considered an early stage technology. Continuing advances are pushing devices into a performance space that threatens more mature technologies. Recent improvements in performance and accuracy are making MEMS an attractive alternative for industrial instrumentation applications. Several companies are pushing the envelope in MEMS technology by integrating instrumentation and mechanical components onto a single substrate. Motorola has developed a two-chip approach, where surface micromachining is used to define a sensor structure, which is wired to a signal-conditioning chip. Analog Devices has an integrated approach that combines the sensor and the electronics on a single chip.
MEMS accelerometer sensors are now being used in seismic recording, machine monitoring, and diagnostic systems and other applications where gravity, shock, and vibration are factors. Smart sensors, or devices that detect one or more variables and then compute a control output for single-point measurement and deployment, is another area of commercialization. Automotive pressure sensors, for example, were among the earliest commercially available micromachined devices. Today, every new car sold has micromachined sensors on-board. These include Manifold Pressure sensors in the engine, accelerometers for active suspension systems, automatic door locks, antilock braking, and airbag systems.
Sensors measuring everything from temperature to vibration to the presence of deadly toxins are expected to decrease in size. As they become less expensive, corporations, governments and the military will deploy them in larger numbers in applications as diverse as industrial processes and battlefield condition monitoring. Data gathered can help end users lower costs or evaluate hazards.
Nanotechnology: Nanotechnology, or the art and science of manipulating matter at the atomic or molecular scale, has the long-term potential of revolutionizing manufacturing processes. It is a technology in its infancy, but with the potential to change everything in a manufacturing environment from sensors to controllers and even manufacturing processes themselves. In the immediate term, nanotechnology will enable significant improvements in areas such as reduced size of industrial sensors and lower power consumption by workstations and controllers.
Use of nanotechnology in manufacturing will initiate fundamental changes in manufacturing processes and enable the ability to design materials with totally new characteristics. It will also lead to more accurate and cost-effective sensing elements for measuring process variables, and workstations and controllers of greatly reduced size and power consumption. Highly sensitive sensors in small packages will be available in the near future through the integration of nanotube elements into silicon chips.
Nanotechnology differs from microengineering not only in scale but also in approach. Nanotechnology''s perspective is based on a bottom-up approach that uses atoms and molecules as building blocks, whereas microengineering''s approach pursues top-down miniaturization of existing systems. Nanotechnology performs functions at the subatomic, atomic, or molecular levels where quantum mechanics rule, rather than the Newtonian mechanics applied for macro level devices.
Nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology are converging as scientists are learning to imitate biological patterns. However, the revolution will not happen overnight. Japan has taken a lead in nanotechnology R & D, followed by U.S.A. and Western Europe. In this year alone over $2 billion will be spent on nanotechnology research around the world. The U.S. government has invested about $1 billion on nanotechnology in the past two years, and contributions from eager venture capitalists are expected to reach that level this year. The National Science Foundation forecasts that the market for nanotechnology products and services will reach $1 trillion by 2015.
IEN: How much progress has been made in resolving software and hardware debugging issues? Documentation challenges? Installation headaches?
Polsonetti: In spite of their negative impact on crucial manufacturing metrics such as time-to-market and maximum machine uptime, software documentation challenges and installation headaches continue to plague manufacturers. In some ways the impact of these issues has been lessened by upgrades such as Windows 2000 and later operating systems that eliminate the deadly DLL hell and the documentation headaches associated with which DLLs go with which application, operating system, etc. Installation headaches continue to be generated from numerous sources, but continued lack of solidly defined and managed requirements documents that reflect not only functional requirements but also integration requirements and stakeholder input remains a primary contributor.
IEN: What advances do you see in plant floor connectivity? Open standards? Data sharing?
Slansky: Industrial Ethernet-enabled devices are growing at a rapid rate. This means that the device level of the factory is connected not only to the factory LAN, but to the entire manufacturing enterprise via TCP/IP. PC-based factory systems have provided levels of open communication and common platforms and applications. Factory control architectures will continue to be built on open standards such as Ethernet, OPC, and now the open standards of the Internet such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL. This will eventually lead to the use of web services in manufacturing and real interoperability across heterogeneous legacy systems.
IEN: Will embedded servers play more of a role in controls? Integrated development environments?
Slansky: The embedded web server is already available at the control level, being incorporated into the PLC. Expect to see embedded intelligence driven much lower in the device tier such as smart drives, actuators, sensors, motors, etc. This will enable asset management to take place at very low levels. Integrated development environments (IDEs) are emerging from automation providers, embedded systems suppliers, and Collaborative Production Management (CPM) suppliers that enable manufacturers to connect control systems to production management systems. This will be critical to providing the real-time information that powers the event-driven manufacturing processes.
IEN: Where are other R & D hot spots?
Ghosh: In the world of manufacturing, technology only has value if it can be applied to solve real world business problems. In this context, ARC believes that three main business issues and the technologies that enable them today are:
- Real-Time Performance Management
- Collaborative Manufacturing
- Advanced Security and Regulatory Compliance.
Most companies have significant potential to boost their productivity and performance through Real Time Performance Management (RPM). The foundation of RPM is the integration of real-time manufacturing data with real-time cost data as a path to Operational Excellence (OpX). Most industry executives do not know how much money they are truly making on a day-to-day basis. Real-time data that comes out of the manufacturing process is typically not integrated with the plant''s accounting system in a way that can show real-time economic performance or true plant production potential.
Collaborative Manufacturing Management (CMM) in its simplest terms is the unification of business, production management, and manufacturing systems as a pathway to Operational Excellence. More companies are now actively adopting CMM strategies with ISA-95 Enterprise-Control System Integration standard. At the IT level, the Microsoft .NET platform and Sun J2EE platform are key enablers toward achieving the goal of a common CMM infrastructure.
Cyber security, plant safety, and regulatory compliance will remain three key contributing factors to automation spending over the next year. While security and regulatory compliance are often looked at from the standpoint of necessities to stay in business, they should be approached with a view toward achieving OpX and from a business perspective. Several key technologies and the ISA-S99 standard are emerging that will enable tighter plant security and improved regulatory compliance.
IEN: What role will wireless play in control technology?
Forbes: Right now wireless is just edging its way into control. Applications with very difficult deployments, like upstream oil and gas, as well as other SCADA applications are leading the way. Often these deployments are combined with digital Fieldbus installations. Furthermore, we now see wireless I/O in the form of single and multi-point cable replacements proving irresistible to process manufacturers when examined on a case-by-case basis. Information, asset management, and asset tracking applications require wireless LAN or WAN infrastructure. ARC expects deployment of these to grow significantly in plants during the next 12-24 months.
IEN: Is Internet-based control gaining traction?
Slansky: Actual control systems that require levels of real-time deterministic communication will remain in the domain of tightly coupled, control-specific protocols. However, moving information from controllers upward to production management and enterprise business systems can and will be done over intranet/Internet-based systems. The thin-client browser-based platform will be the form factor for the factory.
IEN: How can companies maintain legacy equipment with advanced control technology, in the spirit of the lean enterprise?
O''Brien: Control system migration is a primary issue among many automation users today. Few new plants are being built, and capital expenditures continue to shrink. With the increased focus on return on assets (ROA) and Operational Excellence (OpX), users must find ways to effectively migrate from one generation of control system to the next, whether it is from the installed supplier or a competitor. Suppliers are offering an increasingly varied range of migration options for users to choose from. Users must develop a migration strategy that supports their business requirements, and that fulfills a vision of operational excellence.
Control system replacement is hard to justify. Usually, lower TCO and better ease of use do not justify replacement. At best, you get a 25% cut in annual TCO, which is less than 2% of replacement cost. While the downtime threat of the existing system can be a major factor in the decision to migrate, the migration process itself can also cause interruption in process operations and is a major pain point for users wishing to migrate.
The market for process control systems has changed. Most PASs used to be sold for new installations in heavy process industries like refining, petrochemicals, power, and pulp & paper. Today, reduced capital spending, a depressed economy, and more focus on getting more out of existing assets means that most systems sold are for replacement applications.
To make the decision to migrate to newer technology, you must show substantial need, particularly in today''s economic climate. It is no longer acceptable to upgrade to modern technology simply because the technology is new. To make the business case, there have to be many good business reasons. You may be experiencing reasonable reliability with your aging control system, but there is no guarantee it will degrade gracefully -- in fact, the opposite will probably happen. To move to the collaborative manufacturing management (CMM) era, you need the infrastructure that will allow you to do this. A modern process automation system that in itself has provision for adoption of future advances in technology and standards is essential for any sound CMM strategy. You need to select the best partner to migrate from the old to the new strategy.