VISION, EXPERIENCE, ANSWERS FOR INDUSTRY

Convergence must include key automation

solutions that are often overlooked, such as
variable speed AC drives, to fully leverage
the energy management, asset management,
and overall system performance solutions
that can have the greatest effect on
productivity and profitability.
ARC VIEW
OCTOBER 17, 2013

Services Oriented Drives Support Critical
Energy Management and Asset Management
Applications through IT/OT Convergence
By Craig Resnick
Keywords
Information Technology, Services, Control, Convergence, AC Drives, Ener-
gy Management, Asset Management, Internet of Things
Overview
All manufacturing and processing industries face issues that frequently
require the convergence of plant automation and business systems. These
issues include environmental and business sustainability, preserving and
extending the life of capital assets, increasing asset availability and utiliza-
tion, maximizing operational effectiveness, reducing fixed costs,
minimizing variable costs, and empowering workers.
To address these issues, end users and OEMs
alike must move beyond simply automating
and integrating production processes to au-
tomating and integrating workflows and
businesses processes. This requires a conver-
gence that intertwines plant automation
systems with business systems.
This convergence moves toward single systems to accomplish tasks,
streamline operations, and connect customers and suppliers, all with the
goal of lowering costs and adding agility.
This convergence should extend from the major plant and enterprise sys-
tems used for information technology (IT) to major plant systems (DCS,
PAC, PLC, etc.), and ideally, right down to the intelligent devices on the
plant or factory floor, such as variable speed AC drives. The latter is espe-
cially important to enable industrial facilities to fully leverage the potential
of the latest applications for energy management and asset management, as
well as optimize overall system performance. In this manner, enterprise-
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level energy and asset management applications can take advantage of real-
time, online data from intelligent plant floor equipment (such as Ethernet-
connected drives) and embedded IT-enabled services to enhance flexibility,
capability, and application performance.
At least one leading automation supplier has begun to use the term, ser-
vices oriented drives, to describe this new class of intelligent, Ethernet-
connected drives that supports the critical need for convergence between
information technology and operational technology. This concept is con-
sistent with ARC Advisory Groups ongoing research into IT/OT
convergence, predictive plant asset management (PAM), services oriented
architectures (SOA), and the emerging industrial Internet of Things (IoT).
Adding Business-Centric to Applications-Centric
For many years, a key requirement of automation suppliers was to design
and offer applications-centric solutions able to perform the specific tasks
and meet requirements unique to each vertical industry. However, these
solutions must also be business-centric; able to help companies reduce their
energy consumption, manage their assets, and enhance overall production
performance. All devices being deployed, including variable speed AC
drives, must address the primary concerns of end users and OEMs alike.
These include increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and de-
creasing total cost of ownership (TCO). The new generation of services
oriented drives can help meet these objectives because it takes into account
not only the drives, but also the complete product chain, including motors,
drives, and actuators. These requirements are particularly important in
energy- and asset-intensive industries, such as water & wastewater, oil &
gas, mining & metals, and food & beverages.
Services Oriented Drives and Energy Management
One of the primary market demands for services oriented drives is to help
address global energy consumption issues. One place to start is in pump-
ing systems. Across industries, experts estimate that 25 percent of the
electricity consumption comes from pumping systems and 40 percent of the
overall lifecycle cost of a pumping system relates to energy. Variable speed
AC drives are key devices used to save energy in pumping applications in
which approximately 80 percent of the time, pumps typically operate at
only 60 percent of their full speed capacity. By reducing the flow to 50 per-
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Embedded services include historians for
data logging and recording energy usage,
and mobility connectivity so real-time
information can be locally or remotely
accessible via smart phones, tablets, and
other wireless devices.
cent, pump energy consumption could be reduced by 88 percent. Services
oriented drives manage such systems intelligently; hence they can be em-
ployed in conjunction with energy management systems to optimize energy
management.
Additional energy savings could be realized if the convergence in technolo-
gies made possible by modern services oriented drives were combined with
excellence in electrical characteristics. For example, if AC drives with a
THDi of 48 percent were replaced with low harmonic AC drives with a
reduced THDi of 5 percent, users would realize a resulting energy savings
of approximately 20 percent in the losses at the associated cables and trans-
formers. Additional advantages of harmonic mitigation would include
reduced costs by eliminating the need for oversizing AC distribution
equipment and/or by lengthening effective product lifecycles.
Energy Monitoring and Embedded Services
To optimize energy management, it's critical to be able to monitor and inte-
grate both energy consumption and power dynamics for the entire system
(motors/drives/actuators), and to provide the energy management appli-
cation with additional contextual information, including real-time events,
alarms, drifts, and historical data. Appropriate data granularity is required,
plus analytics capabilities to be able to convert all these data into
meaningful information so management deci-
sion can be made locally at the field or the plant
level, or remotely via intranets or the Cloud.
Services oriented drives could provide services
to deliver transparent, instantaneous, prepack-
aged and ready-to-use information upon
process startup. Because these services are embedded, it could help elimi-
nate the need to develop or integrate additional drives-related software or
applications. Services could include historians for data logging and record-
ing energy usage, and mobility connectivity so real-time information could
be accessed locally or remotely via smart phones, tablets, and other wireless
devices.
Services Oriented Drives and Asset Management
More effective asset management is another emerging requirement for to-
days asset-intensive industries.
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Services oriented drives can provide
embedded functionality to support both
preventive maintenance based on
schedules and condition-based
predictive maintenance.
Services oriented drives can provide embedded
maintenance functionality as services to support
both schedule-based preventive maintenance and
condition-based predictive maintenance. The latter
utilizes equipment and process data gathered at the
drive level, but typically processed into actionable
information remotely at the plant or enterprise system level. Predictive
maintenance involves applying condition-based monitoring techniques to
collect and analyze asset data to better understand asset performance and
perform appropriate maintenance before impending issues can negatively
impact plant performance, availability, or safety.
Converging with Plantwide Asset Management Systems
To support traditional schedule-based preventive maintenance and enable
condition-based, predictive asset management, ARC is seeing a significant
increase in the number of process plants and utilities that are implementing
plant- and/or enterprise-level asset management systems. Predictive
maintenance, in particular, requires the integration of key data and infor-
mation from AC drives. Ethernet-connected services oriented drives, with
their additional embedded capabilities, simplify this integration.
For asset management applications, these embedded capabilities can in-
clude object-oriented services for process devices (such as drives, motors,
and pumps); ISA 88- or ISA 95-related services; and dynamic integrated
alarming functionality; plus embedded mobility services to enable remote
access to asset information, such as pump state, number of starts, running
hours, as well as technical documentation and enriched data. Mobility ser-
vices also enable remote specialists to provide application, diagnostics,
analysis, consulting and other services.
Services Oriented Drives and Systems Performance
Services oriented drives could also help overcome many systems perfor-
mance challenges. Built-in Ethernet connectivity could help simplify
integration with other plant and enterprise systems and applications to
help improve process and asset performance. In terms of scalability, ser-
vices oriented drive functionality could range from a standalone product to
a solution approach in which the drives are integrated with systems, such
as telemetry, PACs, PLCs, DCSs and SCADA, as well as devices via ser-
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Services oriented drives not only play a key
role in drives optimization, but also in the
managed convergence between plant floor
devices, controllers, energy and asset
management systems, and business systems.
vices-oriented architecture (SOA) and open technologies, such as FDT De-
vice Type Managers (FDT DTMs).
Clearly, to ensure data security and integrity, appropriate security stand-
ards, processes, and standards must be put in place. Built-in intelligence
and application functionality embedded as services could also support
equipment and process optimization schemes. For example, services orient-
ed drives can contribute to merge production and asset management
systems along with energy management systems. Thanks to object-oriented
services, the user can have a full and accurate vision of the process and
hence can make more informed decisions.
Conclusion
End users and OEMs need to re-examine their automation and operations
management strategies and develop plans to break down the remaining
barriers to information visibility, collaboration, and unified plantwide
control to enable operational excellence and
improve overall business performance.
ARC believes that the concept of services
oriented drives with web technology stand-
ards; built-in Ethernet connectivity to
simplify plant- and enterprise wide integration; built-in intelligence; and
key energy management, asset management, and system performance im-
provement functions embedded as services, plays well with this vision and
could represent a key component in the emerging Industrial Internet of
Things.
For further information or to provide feedback on this ARC View, please contact
your account manager or the author at cresnick@arcweb.com. ARC Views are pub-
lished and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to
ARC and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.