The Changing Landscape of Supervisory Systems from HMI, / Common Control Room, to “Distributed Multi Point Operational Landscapes” !!!!!

For the last couple of years we have seen the changing supervisory solutions emerging, that will require a rethink of the underlying systems, and how they implemented and the traditional HMI, Control architectures will not satisfy! Certainly in upstream Oil and Gas, Power, Mining, Water and Smart Cities we have seen a significant growth in the Integrated Operational Center (IOC) concept. Where multiple sites control comes back into one room, where planning and operations can collaborate in real-time. Initially companies just virtualize their existing systems back, and then they standardize the experience for operational alignment and effectiveness, and then they simulation, and model, not many have got to this last step.

But in the last couple of weeks I have sat in discussions where people talk about this central IOC, which is key. When you start peeling back the “day in the life of operations” the IOC is only the “quarterback” in a flexible operational team of different roles, contributing different levels of operational. Combined with dynamic operational landscape, where the operational span of control of operational assets, is dynamically changing all the time. The question is what does the system look like, do the traditional approaches apply?

When you look at the operational landscape below, you can see 100s of operational control points where humans will have to interact with the system, with different spans of control, and operational points will be manned and unmanned on regular basis.

Traditionally companies have used isolated (siloed) HMI, DCS workstation controls at the facilities, and then others at the regional operational centers and then others at the central IOC, and stitched them together. Now you add the dynamic nature of the business with changing assets, and now a mobile workforce we have addition operational stations that of the mobile (roaming worker). All must see the same state, with scope to their span of control, and accountability to control. 

Since the 1990’s, control system technology has enabled a flexible delivery of work, where workers can support both “normal” and “abnormal” situations from multiple locations, either in the same room or across the world.  This mechanism has to be reliable, easy to implement, and easy to maintain.  Some customers have applied this mechanism to more than 5 different “points of operation”, which range from equipment panels, mobile devices and local control rooms to regional and national operations centers.

The requirements have become the following:

1.        “Transparency of Trusted Operational State”: with real-time operational actionable decisions becoming key, the ability to monitor, the system raise the situation automatically through operational, asset self-awareness. So there is transparency to whole operational landscape situational state.
2.        “Point of operation”: the implementation must support a configuration where one of the multiple points of operation uniquely can operate, which includes responding to alarms.
3.        Simultaneous “point of operation”: the implementation must also support a configuration where more than 1 worker can operate, which is rarely more than 2.
4.        “Span of operation” flexibility: each “point of operation” can be an individual PID, start/stop or device, or it can be a broader “span” of operation.  This “span” must be assignable in a flexible manner, where the “span” can be adjusted to become narrower or broader.  Example conditions include night time or overhaul conditions for some operations.
5.        Ownership visibility: each possible point of operation must have a simple and clearly visible indication that it doesn’t have ownership, and reinforced indication when it does have the ownership. Clear visibility across the operational landscape as who has point of control, and as a team accountability is understood to respond to the situation promptly.
6.        Management of alarms: it is essential for safety, legal, environmental and health requirements that new alarms animate, suppress/shelve, annunciate and trigger display changes only at the point(s) of operation, and only the workers using the point(s) of operation can acknowledge or silence new alarms. This means all alarms from asset to process, operational, but scope of alarm responsibility is aligned with span of control, but as a team there are “no blind spots” and alarm, situational awareness is escalated based on responsiveness, and situation. Assumption of control, and someone doing something must be removed.
7.        Manage of operational events across different points of operation;Example operators want to be able to set operational limits/events across different operations? How is this managed and governed?
8.         IT/OT seamless integration;Operating, monitoring, trending, alarming and integration with other islands of information to enable the teams to make informed decisions.
9.         Reliability, upgradable, cyber security, network architecture, cloud;
10.      One problem cannot bring down the whole operations!!
11.      Assignment of operation: an authorized worker must have an easy and reliable means to assign and adjust the spans of operation.  The following diagram shows examples of transferring the span of operation between a roving user, a local control room, and a remote operations center:

In the above diagram, Areas or Sites “A” through “D” require supervision by different users or by the same user in different locations.  This scenario also applies to multiple operations consoles or desks within the same room.  The span of operation varies with the operations situations.  The span of operation can overlap among multiple users and multiple locations.

We need one system, but multiple operational points, and layouts, awareness so the OPERATIONAL TEAM can operate in unison, enabling effective operational work. Below is a high-level diagram of the operational team by the situation, you will have multiple skills in each situation, people will move through the situational state, but the diagram shows the merging operational work characteristics.

This emerging dynamic multi-point operational landscape is big topic that I will explore over the next few weeks, as traditional thinking, traditional architectures, and traditional implementations will not enable the transformation in operational work needed to satisfy effective agile operations.

Operational Innovation !! Technology is here but Culture Needs to Evolve!

“Operational Innovation” is a hidden objective of many companies, even if they do not know it, again this came home last week. Why is it hidden because it is not natural for innovation to driven from all parts of the business, companies have a habit of centralizing it? Actually we can all contribute to innovational improvement to the way to take on, execute our “jobs to be done” during the day.

Is Central Practical, or really Distributed Solution Leveraging Micro Data centers, provides a really the Practical Way to go Industry Solutions

In the last couple of weeks I have come across a number of very large opportunities (10 Million I/O) that challenge the traditional thinking of potentially “central” systems.

The key is these are distributed operational systems, in supervisory control, information systems, and Operational control (MES) systems. With distributed vale generating assets (plants) of different sites, but with the many sites orchestrated together into a working align value chain. But today's production requires flexibility and agility requiring “actionable decisions” to be taken at all levels of the Vale chain.

At the “edge” e.g. the field plants decisions must be able to made, and that means the information, and ability act is local, with a timely response. So while Central data centers with master data storage and applications is logical, it is only practical to have distributed systems.

Last week I was speaking at conference and one of my fellow speakers talk about “Micro Data Centers” as the next wave in industrial computing following the banks etc. This appealed to me as faced these large opportunities where they want 99.99% uptime, and responsive systems. While we have developing the software to addressed distributed “peer to Peer” systems, and solutions, the key is the associated hardware. 

So what is a Micro Data Center???A micro-datacenter is a smaller containerized datacenter system designed to solve different problems or to handle different workloads. A micro-datacenter (MDC) is a smaller, containerized (modular) datacenter system that is designed to solve different sets of problems or to take on different types of workload that cannot be handled by traditional facilities or even large modular datacenters.

Whereas an average container-based datacenter hosts dozens of servers and thousands of virtual machines (VMs) within a 40ft shipping container, a micro-datacenter includes fewer than 10 servers and less than 100 VMs in a single 19in box. Just like containerized datacenters, MDCs come with in-built security systems, cooling systems and flood and fire protection.

This blog is worth a read:http://blog.schneider-electric.com/tag/micro-data-centers/

With some interesting comments:“Their size, versatility and plug-and-play features make them ideal for use in remote locations, for temporary deployments or even for use by businesses temporarily in locations that are in high-risk zones for floods or earthquakes. They could even serve as a mini-datacenter for storage and compute capacity on an oil tanker.We have already discussed that Micro data centers are breakthrough solutions, but we are still in the early adoption phase and the market potential is untold. Where are they already in use? How fast will the market ramp up?Actually, you may already be using micro data centers and don’t even know it. The demands of real-time (or near real-time) data processing needs in environments with factory automation (robots), industrial automation (cranes), and bidding or trading stocks and bonds, for example, call for the capabilities micro data centers provide.The sheer amount of data required in such industries like oil and gas drilling and exploration, construction and mining also require processing to be on site and so they do not go through latency increasing hubs.Other sites may not have as much big data, but micro data centers offer advantages through standardization fast deployment, ease of management and troubleshooting and security, not to mention cost effectiveness.But the use case on the horizon with the greatest potential is a massive distributed network of micro data enters to form a content distribution network. This processing on the edge will support the commercial Internet of Things (IoT), including the fast emerging category of wearable devices.   The processing of data could be reduced to mili-seconds here.
Forbes recently reported on the massive size of the IoT — expecting worldwide market solutions to reach a value of $7.1 trillion by 2020 and connected devices to double by then to 40+ billion. While micro data centers might be a niche today, they will become more ubiquitous as they will be needed to facilitate this unprecedented connectivity.”

So when looking at these distributed Industrial Architectures these “small Bunker” micro Centers have the real opportunity to provide a distributed hardware architecture with practical capability to support a distributed Industrial Application of tiered historians and application servers.