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Client Profile: Founded in 1990, Söderenergi is a municipality-owned heating and electricity producer located in Södertälje, Sweden. As the fourth largest heating producer in Sweden, the company produces nearly 2,500 GW heating a year for consumption by people, offices, and industries across southern Stockholm. It also generates about 550 GW electricity each year to meet the energy needs of roughly 100,000 households in the area. All of Söderenergi’s power generation facilities produce electricity by burning bio and recycled fuels and are compliant with Swedish government regulations and ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification standards. Söderenergi was monitoring its control system operations manually, making the systems inefficient and vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.
Requirement: The company was looking for end-to-end digitization of control system management operations to perform more time-efficient maintenance, improve operational reliability, and enhance security.
Solution & Implementation: To support its digitization initiative, Söderenergi entered a multi-year service agreement with ABB and implemented ABB’s Advanced Digital Services powered by ServicePort – a secure and remote-enabled service delivery platform that provides automated system diagnostics in real-time. Software tools resident in the ABB ServicePort platform include 800xA Performance Service, Cyber Security Monitoring Service, Loop Performance Service, and Security Update Service.
800xA Performance Service uses information gathered through scheduled and on-demand analyses and compares it with best practices and standards to determine the underlying causes of performance issues. The collected information is then sorted according to established key performance indicators, allowing the company personnel to track and develop accurate trend performance histories, and make prudent decisions to prioritize between potential issues based on severity, criticality, or business impact scale. The software solution implemented at Söderenergi facilities reduced the time and effort needed to identify actions to improve system reliability, availability, and performance.
As an automatic, non-invasive ServicePort channel, Cyber Security Monitoring Service helps diagnose control system security threats by providing constant remote monitoring and periodic/regularly scheduled security reviews. The tool protects control systems against potential cyberattacks by overseeing the security status of control systems and proactively analyzing the possible security exposures before every plant maintenance and shutdown activity. Installing the solution helped Söderenergi identify areas that are most vulnerable to security breaches, accelerate problem-solving through effective visualization and analysis of possible security weaknesses remotely, and maintain its control systems in a secure and modern way.
Loop Performance Monitoring Service, an advanced platform-independent service, pursues a three-step approach (diagnose, implement, and sustain) to detect, manage, and maintain control loop performance. It uses comprehensive data mining techniques, proven loop performance indicators, and standard service modules to identify troublesome loops, analyze control loop data, and fix loop performance issues. Incorporating the Loop Performance Monitoring Service solution into Söderenergi operations provided plant managers with easy access to process deviation reports that help develop operational trends to allow proactive identification and remediation of loop performance irregularities.
Security Update Service, the final component of the ABB ServicePort platform, helps keep control systems updated and protected with automatic handling of ABB-approved security patches and antivirus files. Implementing the Security Update Service allowed Söderenergi to maintain its control systems updated with latest security measures and enhance system availability, performance, and reliability while ensuring superior protection against malware infection and cyberattacks.
Benefits: The interconnected and the increasingly networked nature of today’s process automation systems poses a serious threat to control system availability and security. Failing to install even a software security patch properly can leave the system open to security breaches. The transition from manual diagnostics to automated diagnostics adopting ABB’s ServicePort service delivery solution enabled Söderenergi to advance problem-solving ability; increase system availability and utilization; lower maintenance, raw material, and energy costs; reduce response time and travel expenses through remote monitoring services; and mitigate cybersecurity risks by establishing next level of cyber protection.
Keywords: Process Automation, ABB ServicePort Platform, Söderenergi, ARC Advisory Group.