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Overview
ARC Advisory Group hosted a session titled “Successful Strategies Around Autonomous Plants” at the ARC 2022 Americas Forum in Orlando. Four speakers shared views on what companies should consider when creating an autonomous strategy.
The presentations focused on foundational technologies that must be considered to move from Level 2/3 to Level 4/5 autonomy. These included state-based control (ISA-106) and a more robust, open, and performant computing platform for ISA-95 Level 3 applications. The most important part of this process is that companies must understand the need to focus their efforts and reap the benefits.
High-availability Edge Computing
After introductory comments by ARC, Steve Bitar: Automation Advisor and David Hedge: IT Architect with ExxonMobil presented on control system infrastructure as the basis for autonomous operations. ExxonMobil’s premise is that the control systems used today are beautifully engineered, quite reliable, and even elegantly designed, however they are going to struggle to get a company past Level 3 autonomous operations (advance regulatory control) in their current state.
Mr. Bitar then outlined four platform characteristics needed to achieve higher levels of autonomy. The first on the list is interoperable and portable software components allowing for easy technology use combined with the potential to use the best-in-class components. The second characteristic is access to more sophisticated software tools to improve code efficiency and quality along with eliminating some of the barriers to innovation. Thirdly, the platform should have interchangeable edge devices allowing for easy improvement of performance and security plus moderating pricing. Lastly, the platform should have high-availability edge computing with configurable fault tolerance and hosting a common failover service.
Then the presentation focused on the last characteristic. Mr. Bitar went into the background of reliability and availability and dove into some details explained with some math and a discussion of synchronization. ExxonMobil then proposed that instead of having synchronization between the application layers, it should be managed by a highly capable middleware.
At this point, Mr. Bitar asked Dave Hedge to discuss ExxonMobil’s prototyping of the concept. First, the team decided to build a physical test rack with the idea being how do we begin to validate the concept of reliability or configure reliability on a heterogeneous platform, meaning take n number of computing devices and make them work together to accomplish a goal. Second, the team searched for the middleware which the team then created as part of an exploration of this concept of open standards communication. Mr. Hedge goes into the details on the approach and the execution of the middleware application.
From its efforts working through the process, ExxonMobil discovered a few things. First, it is possible to use brokerless middleware for sub-second synchronization. Second, it validated the concepts of configurable reliability and subscriber-based voting. Third, the approach can be applied to multiple workload types (control, optimization, HMI, etc.) Fourth, it could successfully implement topic security (authorization and authentication.)
Mr. Hedge stated that the company is planning to validate middleware-based synchronization at scale, demonstrate real-time distributed voting on the prototype system, extend application-based voting to device-based voting, and integrate native publish/subscribe capabilities into the process control runtimes via middleware APIs.
Members can view the presentation video here.
A Pathway to Autonomous Operations
The ExxonMobil team was followed by Mike Williams, who is an industry consultant and ARC Associate. He began by acknowledging that about 70 percent of companies are investigating and implementing strategies around autonomous operations. He then defined Autonomy as a computer solution that systematically and predictably achieves its set of objectives without human intervention and noted that levels of autonomy are directly proportional to the levels of automation at any given moment.
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Keywords: ARC Industry Forum, OT, End Users, Panel Discussions, Case Studies, Autonomous Operations, Autonomous Plants, ESG, Cost Reduction, Knowledge Capture, State-based Control, SBC, Autonomy, Multivariate Control, Model-based Control, Manufacturing 4.0, Sustainability, ARC Advisory Group.