Preparing for the future
Yokogawa’s view on future industrial automation

What are the expectations for the plant of the future? The first thing you would probably notice, is the silence – on the surface, the plant of the future appears quite . . . boring. That first impression is deceptive, however: this is a thriving and dynamic place, where operators are in control, and production runs smoothly. Equipment and procedures comply with regulatory requirements. Product quality is to spec, and costs are under control. Operators and management work in synergy to optimize production, approve batches of product and ensure tomorrow’s tasks are on schedule, while remaining alert for alarms and deviations.

The plant of the future is based on an automation concept characterized by widely integrated solutions and based on accurate models of the process. Process plant operations are managed centrally, from a perspective of manufacturing excellence. A single unified HMI (Human Machine Interface) covering all the functionality required by all manufacturing disciplines is available in a ubiquitous computing environment. As a result, this global manufacturer can benchmark and optimize operations on a global scale.
Yokogawa calls this vision of future industrial automation VigilantPlant. It’s VigilantPlant that guides the R&D, and ensures the development of products and solutions that set the customers on a clear path to operational excellence. What follows here, is a snapshot of activities in a number of key areas, including ubiquitous computing, integration, and modeling.

The value of corporate R&D
First, however, it’s useful to look at the factors that characterize the R&D activities. Always with an eye to the future, Yokogawa constantly promotes the development of technologies for the core test and measurement, industrial automation and control, and information systems businesses. The goal is to establish and maintain the position as a leading solutions supplier with the ability to leverage unique technologies to solve a variety of industrial problems.
Our strategy is to establish leading technologies that will give us a competitive advantage and distinguish us from our competitors, and to develop them in-house. To achieve extremely high levels of reliability and performance, we continue to make aggressive investments in technology development—despite adverse economic conditions. The range of the development areas is very broad. For the industrial automation and control business, R&D focuses on distributed control systems, field instruments, analytical instruments, and recorders. We also strive to develop technologies that will lead to new businesses. So we are researching, for example, core technologies used in micro-plants, field computing technologies that are expected to become more widely used in the ubiquitous networking age, and other leading edge technologies.
As far as intellectual property is concerned, the strategy is defensive: we focus on protecting our use of the latest technology in our area of interest, rather than pursuing an exclusive competitive edge through a pro-patent strategy. Taking that approach a step further, we strive to accumulate intellectual property that
can be used as future standards in the field.
Standardization strategies
The customers expect, rightly, that products from multiple vendors should be interoperable and capable of integration. So we place great emphasis on global standardization activities. We participate in the Fieldbus Foundation and ISA S95, for example, and we are putting considerable effort into specifications for interoperability certification, and the development and provision of dedicated devices for the widespread use of such specifications and interoperability.
Ubiquitous computing
Ubiquitous computing has the potential to change the way we live and work. A ubiquitous computing environment will enable us to utilize information from anywhere, without conscious effort and with a sense of super-realism, from the user’s point of view, and with the utmost flexibility and adaptability.
These benefits will introduce a new
era for measurement and automation, and the “Yokogawa ubiquitous initiative” has been introduced to accelerate our R&D activities and promote the real-life application of ubiquitous technologies.
As a result, we already play a leading role in emerging areas such as IPv6 networks, widely distributed autonomous field instrumentation networks, and net sensing systems, for example. A couple of examples will show how this initiative
is impacting process control and automation:
-Fieldbus-based predictive maintenance provides a very effective answer to the challenge of maintaining all the sensors and other equipment scattered throughout a plant, effectively. We are aggressively pursuing predictive maintenance solutions—which can reduce costs to a tenth of those incurred by a breakdown-based strategy—by adding new functionality to sensors, and developing an infrastructure for predictive maintenance software.
-It seems that quantity can equate to quality, when it comes to multiple networked devices—our work on developing IPv6-compatible small sensor devices, or micronodes, has revealed unforeseen benefits for micronodes distributed networks. For example, the 100+ temperature-sensing micronodes we installed at the Nippon Convention Center in Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture revealed new levels of added value including the ability to forecast the flow of visitors from chronological changes in temperature distribution.
The critical nature of the manufacturing process means that technology in the process industry has necessarily lagged behind other industries. High value products and complex installations need to be protected. The risk to people and the environment posed by hazardous products and processes must be minimized. As a result, technologies are only implemented once they are field proven and mature.
At the same time, a key criterion for selecting a supplier is the ability to provide innovative solutions. We handle this apparent conflict of interest with a development strategy that allows us to integrate new market requirements in existing and field proven products. The same goes for IT revolutions, such as a change of the MS Windows operating system, which we incorporate into our products as an evolution. In this way we believe we are able to combine innovation and reliability in our solutions for the future.
Integration
Increasing levels of integration are key to the plant of the future. When NAMUR introduced 4-20mA as a standard, integration of field instrumentation could advance. Today, the 4–20mA signal also transmits device information (at the very least)—it may well have been replaced by digital communication. Hart, Foundation Fieldbus and Profibus technologies provide the infrastructure to unleash the growing intelligence of field devices. Ethernet technology based on IPv6 will increase the speed of communication and unify the communication infrastructure in the plant. Eventually the physical medium will become 2-wire bus powered Ethernet in combination with wireless.
This abundance of information calls for vertical integration of control systems with maintenance systems. This in turn requires the real-time provision of data such as runtime and status of equipment and its process connection, to maintenance staff. And that in turn requires horizontal integration, to give the maintenance and production manager a complete picture of Key Performance Indicators for availability, uptime, repair times, performance and cost, based on units and processes rather than solely on devices or equipment.
Plant wide integration is of course not only applicable to maintenance: it is valid for all disciplines, and the whole scope of control, safety and MES solutions up to and including ERP. We envisage future plant operations managed through a
unified HMI, irrespective of the functionality.
This HMI will be preconfigured and adjustable for different disciplines such as production, quality, process and instrumentation engineering and maintenance. Horizontal integration will apply across plants and sites as well as units and equipment: alarms at different plants will be normalized and accessed through a common system. This widely integrated architecture supports remote operation, or back-up by operators from a similar plant in another country. Maintenance KPIs and procedures will be aligned throughout the company, and plant engineering unified—but note that configuration tools will need to go beyond IEC61131-3, which is exclusively machine focused.
A major challenge here, of course, is how to handle the vast numbers of legacy systems currently in place. Upcoming solutions for integrating legacy systems will resolve current issues related to speed of data connection and inconsistency in alarm handling and HMI.
Modeling the process
Today every major manufacturer in the process industry aligns its financial reports for consolidation across all operating companies. But the variety of size and design of plants and their IT and process control systems means that operations-related data remains scattered, hard to compare and benchmark. The answer here is the unified automation solution providing vertical and horizontal integration together with accurate process models.
Accurate process models will be key in future automation and control architectures, reducing the number of required measurements and providing additional information that can not be measured with actual devices.
With process models, we can superimpose consistent operations procedures on plants with different equipment or capacities, to support central or even remote operations. And in the area of maintenance, process models can correlate data from vibration monitoring systems, instrumentation and process into useful diagnostics that predict equipment failure.