Amersfoort, The Netherlands -
January 4, 2001
'Fieldbus in the Real World' seminar in Amsterdam
More than 150 invitees from 20 nations attended the "Fieldbus in the real world" seminar in Amsterdam, the Netherlands end last year. Sponsored by Shell Global Solutions, Honeywell, Foxboro, Fisher-Rosemount and Yokogawa Europe, the event focused on the installation experiences of various early adopters of FOUNDATION technology. All sponsors invited one of their customers to present an end user's view.
Fieldbus Foundation Chairman John Berra kicked off the event by reviewing capital and operation expense benefits associated with FOUNDATION Fieldbus. Fieldbus is not just about process control, but how to make our plants run better and safer," said Berra. "This is accomplished by opening up the world of diagnostics at all levels-device, loop, and operations."
One of the most significant end-user presentations concerned the Shell Malampaya oil and gas project. Dick Wismeijer, Shell Petroleum Development Co., Nigeria, explained that Shell had to be especially careful to make the correct process automation technology decision for the future when it started engineering on the off-shore oil and gas project. Because this new system is expected to operate until at least 2020. "Fieldbus provides the remote diagnostics needed to minimize unreliability," said Wismeijer. "It is also a technology that will lead the way in transforming the process control domain into an enterprise-wide information management system." Wismeijer added that, due to the wide geographical distribution of the Malampaya project and limited high-level technical support, the ability to remotely diagnose and resolve problems is critical to maintaining the system's minimum 97% availability target.
Integrated approach required
Teun Hooftman, Petroleum Development Oman LLC, Oman, spoke about significant savings the company has realized from implementing FOUNDATION Fieldbus on its projects in Oman. Hooftman pointed out that using fieldbus requires an integrated approach between supplier/vendor, engineering/automation, and operations/maintenance teams. Shell Canada and Syncrude Canada, both presented information on how FOUNDATION Fieldbus is playing a key role in developing Canada's oil sands. Shell described the steps necessary to ensure that the six engineering procurement construction firms working on their project will successfully install over 4,500 fieldbus points. Syncrude reviewed some of the findings of the host interoperability test completed at Syncrude Canada last year.
A presentation by Tom Nobes, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., UK, demonstrated how to use fieldbus in a safety environment. Nobes described using safety systems and fieldbus as "a trade-off between increased information against increased software complexity needed to provide that information." He also indicated that a working group to move forward in this area has been established, and that discussions are underway with his country's national standards body.
Different fieldbus philosophy
The Amsterdam seminar's co-host, Bindert Douma, Shell Global Solutions International, delivered a key message that each vendor has a slightly different fieldbus philosophy. These are expressed in the way they handle Publisher/Subscriber and Client/Server services in their products. Douma's five years of experience with fieldbus shows that the number of devices in a general purpose installation is a function of update time more than power limitations.
"With fieldbus, you must change the way you engineer projects," told Jim Gray, Foxboro USA. Gray said users must select the technology being used early in the project, and at the same time involve operations. This is because segment design is a function of control strategy, and thus the two must be developed hand-in-hand. Yokogawa's Chuji Akiyama provided an update on the Capabilities File and Common File Format, which are key to host interoperability and off-line configuration of FOUNDATION Fieldbus devices. To illustrate the importance of this information, the Foundation's Interoperability Improvement Project has incorporated device registration in the CFF file.
Honeywell's Peter ter Woort outlined how the integration of fieldbus into a project will impact the traditional Factory Acceptance Test (FAT). "Changing the device changes the history of the device. As such, how do you perform a FAT if the devices are not available?" he asked.
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