Digital intelligence is the inevitable trend of the current development of manufacturing industry, whether it is for discrete industry, or process industry, the future will be through digital intelligent transformation to high-quality development.

For automation manufacturers that provide digital and intelligent empowerment, how to help industrial users carry out digital intelligent transformation, and how to integrate automation technology into advanced digital intelligent technology to further evolve is a key issue related to future development.

Recently, Honeywell, a global leader in process industry automation, held the “Digital Intelligence Future” 2023 science and Technology Innovation Conference in Xiamen, released a number of process control technology innovation results from project implementation to operational excellence, from upgrading to sustainable development, and shared Honeywell’s development strategy for the current and future industrial changes. CONTROL ENGINEERING China invited to participate in this conference and interviewed Zhao Jiang, General manager of Honeywell Process Control China, to have an in-depth exchange on how Honeywell continues to implement the evolution of industrial automation data intelligence.

Experion PKS HIVE: A new evolution for process control systems

In the process industry, almost all large-scale automation is achieved through DCS, and the world’s first DCS system was invented by Honeywell in 1975, and has since become the cornerstone of the development of the industry. After several iterations, in 2003, Honeywell introduced Experion PKS process knowledge system beyond traditional DCS capabilities, once again leading the development of process automation control systems.

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On the 20th anniversary of the release of Experion PKS, Honeywell launched Experion PKS HIVE (Highly Integrated Virtualization Environment) at this technology innovation conference, which is another iteration and evolution of process control technology. “High integration and virtualization are the two most important keywords to understand HIVE, high integration refers to the use of current digital technology to integrate all aspects of industrial production data together, through data analysis, integration to achieve intelligence, and virtualization refers to hardware software, including controller virtualization and I/O virtualization.” This removes the traditional binding between the application and the controller, and the controller and the physical I/O.” Zhao Jiang explained.

The significant advantages Experion PKS HIVE offers over previous process control systems are faster, more cost-effective control system project implementation, simplified engineering configuration configuration, and lower risk for project implementation. Because HIVE virtualizes I/O, there is only one type of general-purpose I/O in the cabinet, which can be configured through software Settings for various switching quantities, output quantities, cards, etc., and in the initial stage of project implementation, as long as you know the number of signals, you can start the project without knowing the type of signals. There is no need to wait for the design unit to give the I/O configuration order and then configure, which not only reduces the amount of I/O configuration and greatly shorters the project implementation cycle. For HIVE, Honeywell also introduced the UPC Universal Control cabinet, which can be moved forward to the field and can also be configured with software to reduce project implementation time.

For example, in a real new plant application, the plant used 28 C300 controllers, which reduced the number of controllers by about 50%, and reduced the number of control cabinets by about 80% through the use of 83 on-site UPC universal cabinets, which also reduced the number of optical fiber and network equipment in the plant network by 80%.

“It’s not just about reducing effort and saving money during the project implementation phase, HIVE is like opening the door to digital intelligence for traditional process control systems.” Zhao Jiang said that from the life cycle point of view, Experion PKS HIVE has more advantages, especially in the future upgrade maintenance only need to update the software can be completed, not affected by the hardware, users no longer have to passively do some hardware upgrades every few years.