Emerson revealed the Smart Remote Automation (SRA) extension for PlantWeb at the Emerson User Exchange 2005 at the Orlando World Center in Florida, US, earlier this week.
The SRA technology's ability to provide remote sites with real-time connectivity with centralised operation centres is designed to enable continuous diagnostics for remote sites, allowing predictive operations and maintenance, and enable increasing site availability and throughput.
Emerson said the first industry to benefit from the extended SRA/PlantWeb architecture would be upstream oil and gas, where production, transportation and distribution operations can cover vast areas.
Unlike traditional SCADA solutions used to collect process data from remote sites, SRA complements this data with information including the health of equipment including pressure, temperature, flow, and level transmitters, and control valves.
"Smart Remote Automation represents an entire new category of technology that will give our users continuous visibility to the health of their field instrumentation, enabling operation and maintenance that is more proactive and efficient, and increasing up-time of their dispersed facilities," said Jon Milliken, president of the Flow Computer division of Emerson Process Management (EPM).
Milliken said the ability to extend the diagnostic and predictive maintenance features of PlantWeb architecture to field instrumentation in remote or dispersed locations would simplify maintenance schedules, marking the "beginning of the end of run-to-fail practices".
The solution is dependent on the 'intelligence' of the deployed field devices; EPM said SRA used proven technologies including its HART-based field devices and on the ROC800 Remote Operations Controller.
EPM said it had enhanced the value of its proven technology with the new ROC Field Server and its AMS Suite with ROC Polling Service.
The new ROC Field Server merges low-bandwidth, low-speed field diagnostics communication with high-bandwidth, high-speed Ethernet host communications, overcoming typical bandwidth obstacles by prioritising data packets, caching and bandwidth management, and automatic directory generation.
ROC Polling Service is software that resides on AMS Suite – EPM's asset management solution – providing communications and database interfacing between the suite and the ROC800 Remote Operations Controller located at each remote site.
The ROC800 communicates with 'smart' instrumentation using the HART protocol. The ROC800 supports a variety of communication and networking technologies including both low and high speed wired and wireless, providing EPM's diagnostic technology capabilities throughout an entire process covering large areas or multiple sites.
