Musing Over the Slow Growth of Control in the Field

Keywords: Control in the Field, Process Automation, Embedded Control, CIF, FOUNDATION Fieldbus, DCS.

This ARC Advisory Group Insight revisits a topic we wrote about last year, "Control in the Field" and attempts to answer the question, "Why haven't we seen faster growth?" for this promising technology.

The need to replace analog 4-20 mA technology with a digital network was a major factor behind the development of FOUNDATION fieldbus (FF) technology. However, the real differentiator between FOUNDATION fieldbus and its counterparts in process automation, such as Profibus PA and HART, is the function block structure and supporting functions that make FOUNDATION technology a complete infrastructure for process auto-mation.

Embedded control functionality in field devices, or "control in the field," is one of the key enablers for achieving high availability control and is a stepping-stone toward single loop integrity. The premise is simple. With control at the device level, control is truly distributed, with no single point of failure in the system above the H1 level. With field control, loss of HMI or I/O communications will not interfere with the normal functioning of the control loop. ARC has learned of multiple instances in which end users have avoided unplanned downtime when field-level control took over after a failure in the system.

Field-level control not only increases availability and reliability, it also frees DCS controllers to handle higher-level control functions such as advanced control and optimization. FOUNDATION fieldbus allows for "dynamically insatiable function blocks." These increase flexibility by enabling users to activate function blocks in a variety of different system components. Once deployed, users can transfer the function block execution from one fieldbus device to another. In addition to basic PID control blocks, a large library of different block types (switches, alarms, and so on) is also available to users.

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