Increasing profitability by improving operational reliability and efficiency, using common safety
Author : John Boville, Marketing Manager, Schneider Electric
12 July 2018
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Today there is an increasing awareness that automation system performance has a major impact on industrial profitability. Automation systems control physical assets that transform energy and raw materials into finished products. The finished product can be sold at profit, which in simple terms is the difference between that product’s selling price and the cost of the energy and raw materials used to make it.
It is also important to keep in mind production assets are significant capital investment.
All companies are required to maximise Return On Capital Employed (ROCE). For production assets, this means making as many products as possible while keeping the plant running reliably and safely. To maximise asset productivity while optimising energy and raw material costs requires access to data from multiple points in the plant’s various systems. This data can then be analysed to make adjustments to processes in real time.
When a new plant or new production equipment is required, capital must be appropriated and funds spent to buy the components and services needed to design, build, install and commission it. This new capital does not begin to generate returns until the new plant or equipment is up and running. Hence speeding up the process, or reducing time to market can help improve ROCE and overall profitability.
Typical safety architectures
As technology has evolved different degrees of control and safety system integration are now possible within a plant:
• Separated: where the safety function is completely separated from the process control function. This is naturally the most complex and costly in terms of plant architecture as two systems need to be managed and maintained. It is still favoured in high risk environments where safety is managed by traditional hardwired technology
• Interfaced: the safety and process system are connected by a gateway and some elements of the system can be shared. This configuration leads to some economic advantages. With the emergence of safety automation, systems today are often connected but separated to keep them independent and avoid potential common cause failures
• Integrated: easing integration, this technology enables the safety and process system to operate on a common engineering tool, which lowers the cost of hardware and reduces the effort required to manage the system
• Common: the most recent evolution allows the safety and process to operate together and is the focus of this paper
Programmable safety: technological advances
Recent advances in electronics and network design have made it possible for the industry to take advantage of transparent, secure Ethernet communications to drive increased process visibility and improve the operational profitability of their plants safely. These same advances also make it possible to design common safety controllers that integrate control and safety features in a single system. Industrial enterprises can now reap the benefits of world class automation system performance as they design, build and operate their plant control and safety systems. This allows them to measurably improve profitable reliability and efficiency, safely.
Good design practices derived from industry standards dictate that control systems must keep process control functions separate and operationally independent from safety functions. This is intended to ensure the process control system has no ability to compromise the safety system in the event of a failure and vice versa.
Today hardware design approaches exist that allow the required degree of separation mentioned in the standards to be obtained by design within a single module.
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Common safety
Common Safety is a technology that allows a closer integration of process and safety functions. It ensures that both process and safety operations are separate and independent with different hardware resources in a common engineering environment. Additionally, safety and non-safety modules are integrated seamlessly to provide a high level of flexibility, adaptability and ease-of-use. The common engineering environment provides independent tasks for the safety functions.
The benefits of common safety
Common safety allows for closer integration with plant control automation systems, ease of use, flexibility & interoperability with plant networks and systems, reduced engineering time and cost needed to design and simplified architecture which improves ease of maintenance.
Industrial Internet of Things
Today it is generally accepted that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) trend offers the possibility for industrial enterprises to measurably improve their operational profitability. These benefits come from leveraging the plant wide, shop floor to top floor connectivity offered by IIoT to gain insight into how operations are running in real time. To do all this securely, world class cybersecurity is critically important, both network wide and at the product level. Enterprise data transparency means that in-plant Ethernet networks are also used for control and interlock functions. To take advantage of common safety and IIoT productivity benefits as safely and securely as possible a robust cybersecurity strategy is needed.
Below are some of the specific ways the Common Safety approach and a secure, transparent high-performance safety PAC such as the Modicon M580 Safety PLC can help improve industrial profitability.
Reduce time to profit
In the right application, common safety controllers eliminate the need to design and implement separate safety systems. Plant owners can now simply program their safety systems rather than design and build them using safety relays or other legacy safety control components. Successful designs are easily replicated from project to project.
Improve reliability and sustainability
Increased access to diagnostics, operating data and improved HMI functionality can increase system uptime and yield by more than 30 percent compared to legacy safety systems. Common safety systems are easier to diagnose, troubleshoot and under- stand than legacy systems because they are far more user friendly.
Additionally, features such as redundant managed power supplies, common spare parts and plant-wide access to energy and raw materials data also improve reliability, energy and raw materials use and therefore profitability. Memory error code correction avoids memory corruption, malfunctions or disturbance that can stop a PLC, so when combined with redundant power supplies, this feature increases overall system availability. All told, by increasing uptime, through-put and sustainability, a Safety Controller can help manufacturers measurably increase the profitability of their assets and operations in real time.
Manage operating risk
In today’s connected world, a robust cybersecurity strategy is essential to protect a plant’s people, production and profits. Part of that strategy demands control and safety systems that are secure by design. Products need to be security certified for security incursions. Furthermore, by separating control and safety system functions, users can realise all the benefits of common safety and IIoT functionality without increasing the risk to their people, their assets and their investments.
Improve productivity
Hardware design is crucial to help users achieve higher levels of profitable operational efficiency, reliability and safety with fewer controllers. Change-Configuration-On-The-Fly (CCOTF) and event logging capabilities, along with one of the largest programming memories in industry, empower the workforce to understand and drive their processes to world-class performance.
Faster response times, for example to initiate a shutdown or mitigate a safety risk, and local event logging are crucial for asset optimisation. They also make it easier to log and understand both the historic and real-time performance of the safety system.
Increase operational profitability, safely
Operating costs such as the price of energy and raw material usage can change at any point in the process and often at multiple points in the process. As manufacturers seek to measure and control their business risks, particularly risks to the efficiency, safety, security, reliability and profitability of their operations, they must have real-time access and information to key operating variables and information. A complete and transparent Ethernet communications backbone provides the secure transparency manufacturers need to improve the real-time profitability of their operations. A secure, fully functional Ethernet backbone means easy access to production and safety system performance so that plants can balance the equation between asset productivity and production cost safely.
Mobile-enabled technology places safety system data in the hands of those who most need it, whenever and wherever they need it. System performance can be monitored centrally to drive safety training and continuous improvement activities, while common control and safety system hard-ware reduces spare part inventory and training costs.
All this helps industrial companies leverage their automation investment to do more than simply control their production assets. It helps plants turn automation into a true source of increased operational profitability.
Conclusion
Today there is increasing awareness of the role automation systems play in improving the operational profitability of industrial companies. Balancing the equation between asset productivity, safety and profitability is a complex problem but emerging trends such as IIoT offer the possibility to gain the insight needed and put the systems in place to solve the problem in real time.
In the right application, Common Safety offers the opportunity for industry to digitise their safety systems. When combined with the performance, networking and security features of a world class e-PAC a plan can be built to yield significant gains in operational profitability and to do it both safely and securely.
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