Attendees at a
recent ISA conference on industrial wireless technology got plenty of exercise;
when about
130 paying attendees showed up—more than double the number that had initially
been expected—ISA organizers had to find a bigger room at another hotel to
accommodate the group, forcing attendees to walk back and forth between two
hotels for alternating conference sessions and networking breaks.
The turnout
at the July 23-24 event, sponsored by the Instrumentation, Systems and
Automation Society (ISA, www.isa.org), in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is another indication of growing interest
in wireless technology by industrial end-users. But judging by their
comments—both from behind the podium and privately during networking breaks at
the conference—many users are still taking a go-slow approach to the
installation of wireless in their plants.
Tough
sledding
Witness the
presentation titled, “Cautiously Moving Forward with an Industrial Wireless
Initiative in a Process Research and Development Facility.” The speaker,
engineer James D. Murphy, from Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical maker Eli
Lilly and Co., said that when he earlier volunteered to speak, he expected that
he would be an industrial wireless end-user by the time of the conference.
“But we’ve
seen several delays, and I’m still a prospective user,” Murphy confessed to the
group. While Lilly uses wireless technology in various locations within its
facilities, he said, “wireless currently is not used in any manufacturing
system.”
Despite
having the go-ahead for an industrial wireless project from Lilly’s process
control group, “communication with the company’s IT (information technology)
infrastructure group has been tedious,” Murphy explained. His advice to other
end-users considering a wireless manufacturing initiative: “Begin the dialog
with IT governance organizations early. We did not anticipate [IT] concerns
around bandwidth protection and security of the installed system.”
Potential
conflicts between controls and IT groups is only one of several barriers that
continue to hold back industrial wireless networking. Others frequently
mentioned include questions about reliability and security, as well as a lack
of industrial wireless standards.
Standards
progress
On the
standards front, conference attendees received the good word that progress is
being made. The ISA’s SP100 wireless standards committee expects to have a
draft version of ISA100.11a—the first of an anticipated “family” of ISA
industrial wireless standards—ready for balloting by October, said Patrick
Kinney, of Kinney Consulting, Export, Pa. Kinney is co-chair and chief editor
for ISA100.11a.
ISA100.11a is
expected to become an approved standard by next year’s first quarter, and
initial wireless products based on the standard should be available during the
second half of 2008, sources said. Release 1 of ISA100.11a will focus on
supporting the process industry without excluding factory automation, said Kinney.
Initially, only 2.4 Gigahertz (GHz) radios based on the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard will be included, for use
in either star or mesh topologies. The Release 1 standard is designed for easy
vendor interoperability, flexible and scalable security, and comprehensive
coexistence with other wireless networks. It will tolerate latencies of about
100 milliseconds, making it suitable for monitoring and some open-loop control
applications. Standards for systems supporting other applications, including
closed-loop control, will come later.
Think it
through
Conference
presenters included representatives from various vendor companies, including
keynote speakers from major process control suppliers Emerson
Process Management (www.emersonprocess.com), of Austin, Texas, and Honeywell
Process Solutions (HPS, http://hpsweb.honeywell.com), based in Phoenix, both of
which are promoting wireless products.
Harsh
Chitale, HPS vice president of strategy and global marketing, noted that
wireless holds great promise for process plant improvements in core areas of
safety, reliability and efficiency. One chemical plant has seen a six-month
return on investment from its use of wireless mobile field maintenance tools,
he said, while wireless technology has helped one ethanol plant avoid costly
spills and achieve savings of $750,000 annually.
But Chitale
also warned that the amount of spectrum in the wireless world is limited.
Because applications will need to coexist in a limited bandwidth space, he
said, it is important for industrial end-users not to rush into wireless
technology without thoroughly thinking things through. To do so would be to
risk bandwidth choke points, network downtime and “the pain of rip-and-replace”
in the future, he said.
Do it now
Taking a more
aggressive tone, however, was John Berra, president and chief executive officer
at Emerson Process Management. In a presentation titled “No Wires, No Limits,”
Berra told attendees that the promise of wireless is so compelling that
end-users should get started now, even before industrial standards are
completed. “I am not so sure, based on my experience, that we’re going to be
able, at least today, to come up with a top-to-bottom answer before anything is
done. I think were going to have to try the individual pieces and work them
together, as time goes by.”
Because of
the ability of wireless to produce demonstrable business benefits on a sweeping
scale, Emerson believes that wireless technology has the potential to impact
the process industries more than any technology advance that has come before
it, Berra declared. Benefits will come from wireless video surveillance,
monitoring and tracking of both physical assets and personnel, as well as
improvements in mobile maintenance and controls activities, said Berra.
But he was
most effusive about the ability of wireless technology to provide a range of
process information that has been impossible or too expensive to obtain with
wires in the past. This will enable new levels of diagnostics and predictive
intelligence, Berra said.
“The
advantages are so compelling, and we need to get on with it. That’s really what
this is all about—the wireless potential to unlock predictive intelligence, so
people can have a fighting chance of making their plants run better, avoiding
unplanned shutdowns, avoiding safety issues, avoiding excess energy
consumption, avoiding emissions issues,” Berra said. “These are what an
automation professional is standing ready to deliver, and wireless is the key
that unlocks this potential for all of us to go deliver those benefits.”