Bueller? I think that guy's our CEO! At the risk of spoiling the discussion, I'll second Ron's comments. I have scripts to do some of the "system health" stuff, and a few other utilities to extract relevant data from the system. I'd add to the system health a comment about making all the relevant parameters accessible as C:B.P or OM objects so they can be historized, sent to other systems, etc. [As a side note, Honeywell did system health and things like finding block connections, I/O loading, etc. better in 1995 than I/A does it today. Bad connections/references showed up at load time, so you didn't have to worry much about that unless you deleted a block after the fact.] Wait -- I won't be there anyway, so here is some more greenhouse gas from my brain. Disclaimer: I used a Honeywell TDC3000 for 10 years. I've looked at Emerson's white papers. Alarm delays: Honeywell had that too way back when. But it appears that that will be coming to a CP270 near you soon. True online, on-process upgrades: Honeywell had that in 1990. I did 4 major on-process software upgrades on a Honeywell system from 1990 to 2000. Their controllers could run with two different versions of OS software in the primary and secondary which allowed one-side-at-a-time upgrades. Make connectable = settable. Across the board. If you have to start with the CP270, fine, but do it. Or implement a system-wide, CP-level, ACL system for parameters. Honeywell had systemwide ACLs, but their security model had its own flaws, so I can't make a direct comparison. Emerson on paper appears to have some powerful features built into the controllers (MPCs, fuzzy logic, etc.). And apparently user-friendly software to set them up. Not something you use every day, and I don't know how well it works, but it is something that differentiates them. Foxboro for its part never produced particularly good docs on how to use FBTUNE and FFTUNE blocks -- unfortunate, really. Make the discrete output TAs more complete: supply -power bussing, fuse or overload-protect every output channel individually (and built-in surge suppression for inductive loads would be nice, too). This is an oversight from every DCS vendor I've seen; we always have to design around it. FDSI FBMs: A definite strength of I/A. Many other vendors want you to OPC that kind of stuff into the system, at an attendant cost in reliability and complexity. Just be sure to always let us manually tune the polling if necessary :) Make an FCP270 with the 100Mbit fiber fieldbus. I'd like to get away from the 1x8s if possible, but prefer the flexibility of the ZCPs. More flexibility with HART passthru. Device discovery/polling of HART parameters via OPC or some other higher-level protocol. Not sure what that would entail, but it appears Emerson at least has it for HART and FF and it's drag-and-drop integrated with the configuration tool as well as an industry-standard instrument management system (AMS). "Scriptability" is another strength of I/A relative to other systems. Some of the new "bulk-load" tools are great, but I'm an old Unix-head, and would prefer not to have to shuffle Excel files back and forth on a USB stick to do bulk changes (I'm not loading Excel on my AW). KISS and all that. Corey Clingo BASF Corporation "Ron Schafer" <rschafer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent by: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 07/24/2008 10:20 AM Please respond to foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To <foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> cc Subject [foxboro] 4)What do you think I/A lacks and how can we as a user community overcome these deficiencies? What does Delta-V do better? Yokogawa? Honeywell? anyone? anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I think IA lacks a good tool for daily maintenance and system health. It needs something EASY to use, gives reliable results, and most of all will tell us EVERYTHING wrong on the system! Maybe not everything but at least the basic problems that really don't need to be problems. For example; tells me every historian point that does not exist tells me every connection that is disconnected tells me all the display connections that don't have a valid path to connect to and the list goes on, and on, and on.... BTW David, I think Bueller is still in running around in his Ferrari! Nobody has seen him in school..... Ronald G. Schafer Distributed Controls System Administrator White Birch Paper Company Bear Island L.L.C. Division Ashland VA, 23005 Phone 804-227-4034 Fax 804-227-4052 Email: rschafer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________________________________ This mailing list is neither sponsored nor endorsed by Invensys Process Systems (formerly The Foxboro Company). Use the info you obtain here at your own risks. Read http://www.thecassandraproject.org/disclaimer.html foxboro mailing list: //www.freelists.org/list/foxboro to subscribe: mailto:foxboro-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=join to unsubscribe: mailto:foxboro-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=leave