Wednesday, April 18, 2007

How safe is the plant down the street? I'm in Chicago today for a series of meetings the rest of the week. Today, Luis Duran of Invensys Triconex, Bob Adamski of Invensys Premier Consulting  Services and Paul Miller of Invensys stopped by to update Wes and me about safety systems and what's new with Triconex. FYI, Wes wrote one of the best explanations of the spectrum of ideas in safety systems for process control I've ever seen (not that I'm biased or anything) in the April issue of Automation World that's now online. There is a whole spectrum (think all the way from R to V in the old ROY G BIV thing you learned in jr hi) of solutions from totally separate safety and control to totally integrated safety and control, then a bunch of colors i n between. Invensys is in the separate category. Plus it features TMR (triple modular redundant or 2 out of 3 voting). Much of the talk linked safety and system availability (a good safety system should help operations keep the plant running, too). Something new they shared was some new software that enables information integration from the Triconex safety system to a DCS or HMI. The integration is for information only and in no way (according to them) compromises the safety system. This gives its customers the integrated part of "safety integrated systems" without what Triconex sees as the dangers of integrating safety and control. I should mention that Premier Consulting is an arm of Invensys that provides safety consulting and engineer training for customers. It maintains separation from the Triconex sales organization since it may be working with systems other than Invensys in the field. Bob said that it has trained over 440 engineers  worldwide. Safety is a "hot" topic in both the process and discrete worlds right now. Covering it is even trickier than the wireless networking market. We're trying to make sense of it. This topic is too important for fear, uncertainty and doubt to crowd out judgment in the minds of process engineers and managers. 11:13:43 PM    comment []