On July 20, 1969, a pair of cryptic error codes almost cost the U.S. the moon landing. The “1201” and “1202” alarms reported by Buzz Aldrin were as much a mystery to mission control as they were to the astronauts in the midst of a harrowing descent toward a boulder field on the moon. But unless they could figure them out, with only seconds left before fuel ran dry, they’d have to abort the first landing of the $25.4 billion Apollo program.
为了tunately, the lead engineer for the lunar module’s flight software, Margaret Hamilton, was standing by with her team in a back room at the马萨诸塞州理工学院的德雷珀实验室, ready to deliver the translation: 1201 and 1202 were nothing to worry about and the mission could continue.
A variation of this story has played out far less publicly in countless control rooms in every industry that depends on programmable controls. Some valve or sensor reports an exception, and a screen or control board reports a code, which has to be interpreted by a human controller, who then has to make a decision: shut down the line (i.e., abort the mission) or let it continue. As in the Apollo missions, money and sometimes even lives are at stake.
“这是一个很好的类比，”罗伯特·特拉斯克（Robert Trask）说。贝克霍夫自动化, about the moon landing’s relation to process automation. He also asks the question: What’s an operator or a human controller to do when a Margaret Hamilton isn’t standing by?
It’s not an idle question, says Glenn Schulz, managing director of theFDT组，其FDT技术致力于确保设备之间的更大互操作性。“近年来，一个重要的因素是最终用户内部工程人员的裁员。”如果机器之间或机器与人类之间的某种不匹配，操作员被留下来咨询手册或在谨慎的侧面咨询手册，并关闭以进行检查，这可能是昂贵的举动。
为了tunately, increasing numbers of controls and other equipment can make the call themselves, automatically, while also keeping human controllers in the loop with reports that provide much more detail than cryptic exception codes.
The emerging era of connectivity, sometimes termed Industry 4.0, is not only allowing processes to run more smoothly, but is also enabling a host of new capabilities. “Today is all about networking,” says Fred Yentz, CEO ofTelit IoT Platforms, formerly ILS Technology. “This is the any-to-any networking paradigm that’s going to bring a whole bunch of new value.”
建立正确的连接
为了Opto 22regional sales manager Dave Engsberg, stationed in Wisconsin, interoperability can mean connecting machines that are separated by miles of open terrain. He cites the case of a rural water utility with 16 widely separated pumping stations that, with his help, got new controls—and along with them, new connectivity.
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| 与手机连接,经理可以提醒via their smartphones if something goes wrong. Source: Opto 22 |
直到一年前，现场技术人员必须访问每个站点，以确保一切顺利。“如果他离开3号车站后的那一刻发生了什么事，他直到明天才再次到达3号车站？”恩格斯伯格问。现在，如果泵故障，则通过其智能手机（无论碰巧在哪里），不需要网站访问或口译员，就会通过其智能手机发出警报。
移动连接也是Engsberg的OEM客户端的最终用户的关键。最终用户依靠客户的生物隔离室，以使其免受潜在的感染样本和牲畜的侵害，同时他们从外部监视和控制设备。该系统很容易使用，因此不需要专门的工程师进行调整。用户可以为异常代码设置自己的要求，并定义如何在哪些条件下发送警报。英格斯伯格说：“他们进去了，说，‘如果湿度超过90％，我想获得一条文字。’他们可以自己动手做。这对他们来说是巨大的。”
为了plant managers seeking such advantages brought by greater interoperability, FDT’s Schulz advises careful planning before implementing improvements. “Start with a clear ‘future state’ model for the plant that describes the features, characteristics and capabilities for the plant,” he says. “This model should cover the next two to three major capital campaigns.”
Greg Hood, product manager forRockwell Automation’sPlantPAx process automation system, agrees that planning is everything, whether you’re starting from a clean slate or advancing an existing process. “You can’t overestimate the value of a functional design spec or user requirement specification that OEMs and vendors like Rockwell can design to.” Ideally, he says, the planning process starts with the end user, but it can benefit from the input of the other players involved.
舒尔茨说，将新设备与旧设备混合在一起，需要一些额外的工程，以确保基于物理和软件的连接都可以很好地播放（请参阅“请参阅“请参阅“请参阅“请参阅“Finding Support for Legacy Control Systems”). “Engineer ‘legacy bridges’ that make the best use of what is available in the older machines,” he suggests. And don’t expect perfection. “Compromise is the operative word for these legacy bridges, as older machines will lack much of the desired features of the future state.”
Protocol soup
Automation Software Developer的美洲销售总监Adam Kennedy说，新旧连接机器的关键是使用一个可以理解所有相关协议的控制器Kepware Technologies。他说：“这个空间中的许多人将使他们的设备运行10年以上。”“我们的软件中有通信协议能够恢复到远处。”
OPC Unified Architecture（OPC UA）和FDT，可以使用不同协议在各种机器之间提供共同基础的两个开放标准。
“对我们来说，这是不费吹灰之力的，”贝克霍夫的trask说。“ OPC UA绝对是不容忽视的力量。”在基于PC的控制器上运行的OPC UA服务器，不同类型的机器可以通过OPC UA“中间人”来发送和接收数据，以充当翻译器。内置的安全功能（例如消息加密和用户身份验证）也使OPC UA非常适合通过Internet共享数据，以用于远程操作，例如自动警报。
舒尔茨指出，如果机器与开箱即用的开放标准兼容，它会有所帮助。他说：“例如，如果所有机器都支持OPC和FDT打开标准，那么从各种机器中汇总数据要容易得多。”“这些数据可以为制造执行系统（MES），质量和维护管理等各种系统和应用提供。”
Open standards have the added benefit of providing a layer between the user and disparate control architectures, allowing for a unified interface for control and monitoring. “Open standards such as FDT provide a means for the end user to obtain rich workflow support and consistent benefits without needing to drill into the minutia of control architectures,” Schulz says.
Soon, users will be able to take advantage of the best features of both OPC UA and FDT in one installation. “The FDT Group and the OPC Foundation are concluding a joint effort to integrate OPC UA into FDT,” Schulz says. “The end solution will make the FDT application appear as an OPC UA server, exposing the control system topology along with real-time device data and device health. This will allow any OPC UA client to directly access this rich pool of FDT managed data from any location in the world—as allowed by the security architecture.”
正是这种能力与世界任何地方连接，带来了许多其他好处，可以帮助优化最终用户的整个企业以及单个工厂内的效率。
Connecting people, suppliers and processes
Experts at Rockwell, Beckhoff and elsewhere agree that demand is increasing for greater connectivity not just within the plant, but outside it as well. “Customers indeed know what they want,” says Rockwell’s Hood. They want more information with which to make their plants run more efficiently.
This information, Hood says, “focuses on the performance of the line, for example, which then drives down to the individual performance of the OEM machines that make up the line: the uptime and availability, the root cause for downtime, length of downtime—all of that type of data is important for the end user.”
Besides optimizing the performance of a line, data from the machines can also help optimize regulatory compliance, sustainability measures and more—for example, by tracking the amount of energy used by each piece of equipment.
And now, with expanding options for connectivity beyond the plant, data for optimization can also come from suppliers and other key outside players.
超出了工厂的墙壁,最常见的类型的公司mmunication is through portals into the supply chain, according to Khris Kammer, information partner and competency manager for Rockwell. “The plant can see in a portal upstream of themselves what’s happening in terms of raw material availability and raw material quality,” he says. Communication can go the other way, too, from a plant to suppliers, who can adjust their own output in response to upcoming demand, he adds.
The industrial world is still in the pre-smartphone era as far as implementing the connectivity that consumers take for granted, though, Trask says. “My smartphone does amazing things. Why? Because it’s standardized on interfaces between stuff,” he says, pointing out that consumers can operate their smartphones without knowing how the various systems inside connect with one another. He’d like to see the automation industry moving toward that ideal as well, with the machines of an entire plant routinely functioning like an interconnected, seamless whole.
From what he’s seen, Engsberg thinks we’re getting there. “We’ve just got to get guys over the hump,” he says. Change does seem to be in the air. Engsberg sees that customers are increasingly savvy to the benefits that connectivity as well as interoperability can bring. “It used to be you had to educate your customer,” he says. “Now, a lot of people educate themselves.”
