Re: [foxboro] [foxboro]
- From: Corey R Clingo <corey.clingo@xxxxxxxx>
- To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:23:27 -0500
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>
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[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
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