Thursday, September 6, 2007

More wireless controversy This is a long post, and it's highly unusual. I was on various planes receiving and communicating this issue. I received a "letter to the editor" from Jack Bolick, president of Honeywell Process Solutions who opposes ratification of the Hart wireless specification in voting on Friday. I'm printing his letter and Ron Helson's (executive director of Hart Communications Foundation) response. There's so much politics involved here, I have no further comment. (Note: itâo[dot accent]s late and I have to get up early to appear at the ISA Sales & Marketing panel in the morning, so I havenâo[dot accent]t changed the styles into AP Style like I normally wouldâo[per thou]too many all caps things.) September 5, 2007 Dear Gary: This Friday, Sept. 7, the HART Communication Foundation board plans to vote on the HART 7.0 specification, which includes the wireless specification known as WirelessHART. Honeywell, a board member of HCF, intends to vote no on this particular issue. I want to take this opportunity to share our position, as well as invite your readers to join Honeywell in urging HCF to agree to consider adopting the ISA100 standard - a single, unified standard designed to facilitate communication for all fieldbus protocols, not just one. Honeywell is concerned the industry is heading down a path that creates confusion and slows innovation through the adoption of two industrial wireless protocols. The industry is inevitably comparing the recently affirmed ISA100 Principles of Operation with the proposed WirelessHART specifications. The most striking difference is that while WirelessHART is designed to support the HART protocol only, the ISA100 standard is designed to support multiple protocols, including HART. ISA100 is positioned and designed as a universal network, transporting information from all types of industrial wireless protocols. Backed by ISA's standard-setting expertise, heritage, and knowledgeable end-user members, ISA100 supports implementation of protocols such as HART, Profibus, CIP and FOUNDATION Fieldbus on top of its flexible application layer. This obviates the need for single protocol networks like WirelessHART. ISA100 accomplishes this in an efficient, secure and high-performance manner. Functionally, WirelessHART and ISA100 are like a pager and a cell phone, respectively. A pager is a single purpose device dedicated to one function, like WirelessHART is dedicated only to the HART protocol. However, a cell phone is a more universal device designed to efficiently and effectively perform many functions while also providing the paging function. Users are understandably wondering why they would ever need the subset (WirelessHART) if they can have the superset (ISA100). During the ISA committee's July meeting, it approved the Principles of Operation, setting the stage for the ISA100 draft standard to be released in October. Neither standards group has yet to propose or approve test and certification requirements, but both groups plan to have this final step completed in early 2008. It simply makes no sense to pursue WirelessHART when ISA100 will be available in a similar timeframe. Honeywell has always been, and will continue to be, a strong supporter of the HART protocol. Honeywell believes the best path for HCF's continued success is to remove WirelessHART from HART 7.0, adopt ISA100 as the networking technology for HART wireless deployments and adopt the remaining portion of the HART 7.0 specification. We invite your readers to join us in urging HCF and its board members to implement wireless deployments on top of the ISA100 application layer, as other fieldbus protocol organizations are planning to do. It is in the best interest of the industry to rally around a single, universal wireless network that supports a variety of protocols and has the ability to be flexible in the future. Wireless will revolutionize in-plant industrial communications, and we hope you will join Honeywell in urging the HCF to lead the industry in the right direction. Sincerely, Jack Bolick President Honeywell Process Solutions Honeywell Process Solutions 2500 West Union Hills Drive Phoenix, AZ 85027 And the response: The September 5th letter to the editor from Honeywell's Jack Bolick was a surprise and disappointment to the HART Communication Foundation (HCF). The letter is counter to the view of the HCF staff and the HCF Members who overwhelmingly approved the HART 7 Specifications including WirelessHART during the extensive review and approval process that concluded in June of this year. The open process used to create this enhanced HART Standard began more than two years ago with the support of both the Board and the Membership.  This process engaged the brightest minds from the leading companies in our industry, including Honeywell, and produced a wireless communication standard that is simple, reliable and secure, meeting the needs of users and the process automation industry. The HART 7 Specifications, including WirelessHART, have been overwhelmingly approved by HCF members and are ready for official release. I believe that the HCF Board of Directors will affirm the desire of the HCF Membership and authorize release of these Specifications at tomorrow's meeting. Honeywell's continued strong support of the HART Protocol technology is very much welcomed and I hope that they will reconsider their position on this important matter. Ron Helson Executive Director, HART Communication Foundation 11:36:08 PM    comment []

Wonderware's big announcement "Well, it's an earthshaking event," began Mark Davidson, Wonderware's vice president of global marketing, at yesterday's kick off of InTouch 10.0 and System Platform 3.0. Just before announcement time, there was a 3.4 tremor in Los Angeles. Thankfully, the announcement was far better than the humor ;-) The first hour of the presentation was broadcast over the Web to customers, journalists and integrators around the world. I had had an opportunity to interview several systems integrators (you'll see the story in the October issue of Automation World in a supplement devoted to the new technology and products) plus an entire day of inundation in Wonderware yesterday. After sleeping on the information, I'm ready for some analysis. And I truly believe what President Mike Bradley has told me more than once--this may be the biggest announcement in the 20-year Wonderware history. The company invested in more than 100 person-years of development, testing and quality over the past 4-1/2 years on this. Vice President of Development Pankaj Mody pointed to the 4,500 meals expensed over the past several months as developers worked late and over weekends to get this completed as an example of the hard work. This is one of those product announcements that we get to attend that are so significant to the company and the result of so much hard work that the general excitement in the company is palpable. System Platform 3.0 is essentially an updated and expanded ArchestrA implementation. If you're like me and puzzled about just what ArchestrA is, well several integrators ignored talking about the underlying technology (a service-oriented architecture, if you will), but talked about it in terms of a way to model a plant within the integrated development environment (IDE). Programming is in "objects" and one new thing with this release is that graphics (vector-based, which gives a huge boost to InTouch) are also objects that can be an attribute of another object (say a pump, for instance). There is just one IDE for the entire system. Once an object is configured, it can be re-used many times. In fact, integrators cited this object reusability as the key business-performance boosting function of the new software. The System Platform also serves as the foundation for adding future MES components as the system matures. The latest version of InTouch, the human-machine interface and SCADA application, gets strength from the ArchestrA IDE along with many new features. The new graphics package makes it easier to create, deploy and use  them. Much thought has been given to the display of images, for example the ability of faceplates to zoom up on mouseover, then recede alleviating the screen of unnecessary clutter. Bill Sherwood, president of integrator Progressive Software, added to his remarks about the value of reusability citing the value of a common development environment, improved scripting and increased collaboration ability. The new scripting is based on Microsoft .Net, an easier-to-use feature than the previous Wonderware scripting language that was derived from the C++ programming language. Brad Wise, vice president of business development for integrator Maverick Technologies, pointed to the increased IT/automation integration as another key feature of the new products. Other benefits for both his company and its customers include the configuration and deployment tools (ability to deploy from a central server--an IT-friendly feature), central change management, reduced commissioning and debug time, faster troubleshooting and the security features that take advantage of the latest Microsoft technologies while extending current IT security practices. Wonderware Vice President of HMI/SCADA business Rashesh Mody, while noting that there were over 200 new features in InTouch 10.0, told the worldwide audience about the advantages of vector graphics that allow an image to be deployed on a variety of physical devices without additional programming. Further, the new graphics work on Microsoft operating systems XP, 2003 and Vista. Even more interesting is the migration path permitting applications running in InTouch 2 on Windows version 2 to run on the latest InTouch. Mike Bradley, Wonderware president, said that Wonderware products are found in 1/3 of the world's manufacturing plants. Of the current 450,000 licenses, they expect a "significant" amount to upgrade. Bradley stated the Wonderware mission of helping customers achieve operational excellence by powering intelligent plant decisions in real time. Within the current customer base, no SIC code represents more than ten percent of total sales showing the breadth of its market. "We want to own the real-time space in manufacturing and infrastructure," he added. Wonderware's vision of the future of the software middle space in manufacturing between the plant floor and enterprise systems as an eventual mashup of the current HMI and MES applications into something Bradley calls "real-time manufacturing operations" software. 10:46:28 PM    comment []