Invensys Australia Managing Director, Keith Marriner looks at the big drivers behind some of his company's innovations over the years and how that has been applied to the latest product release – Foxboro Evo.
[The following advertorial appeared in the PACE 60th anniversary November 2013 special issue. The Control Systems section was supported by Invensys.]
Technology breakthroughs
The evolution from propriety products and systems to open, standards based solutions, is the most significant technology driver in the process automation industry.
This trend has delivered much innovation whilst enabling solutions from vendors to unlock the inherent information available in the process systems.
These technologies are apparent at the instrument level, think Fieldbus; the control room, Unix and Windows operating systems and associated fixed and mobile COTs hardware platforms; at the Information layer, OPC enabled interfacing and more recently Cloud based solutions.
Invensys innovations
In the early 20th century Foxboro led the instrument field in manufacturing gauges, developing low and high pressure gauges often found in luxury automobiles of the day.
World War I saw Foxboro instrument gauges quickly applied to aircraft. Peace time began with Foxboro leading the industrial process field with the pneumatic controller. Moving forward Foxboro continued innovating with products such as the differential pressure cell, integral control and fully redundant digital controls.
Process control innovation was leading edge, however it was time for safety to catch up. In 1983, Triconex was founded, changing the way we see safety control forever by applying aviation industry inspired TMR technology to process safety.
Thirty years on, Triconex remains the number one process safety system in the world.
In 1987 Foxboro launched the I/A series process control system, the first DCS to be based on standards, open technology, object based software and a promise to maintain a continuously current architecture.
2006 heralded further technology innovation and defined a new industrial control space, ECS, Enterprise Control System. Launching the first industrial SOA enabled unification of control, applications and information domains to achieve not just process control but business control.
Looking into the future
Manufacturing and resource industries face a number of challenges which require higher levels of operational insight, with context sensitive information available real time, capable of being consumed from a variety of locations, devices and media.
The underlying systems must provide increased operational integrity for maximum production availability, whilst minimising exposure to threats, all this and be adaptive to change. With these challenges in mind, Invensys recently launched its latest Process Automation System, aptly called the Foxboro Evo.
An evolution of our I/A series heritage, inbuilt functionality such as Situational Awareness Graphics, managed workflows, integrated safety and mobile device integration enable industry to realise the value of this technology today whilst building a future-proofed asset for tomorrow.