Thanksgiving moment...

Happy Thanksgiving ... the Internet of Islands..

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

.....

...

John Donne

On US thanksgiving this year, I give thanks for the men and women who make up the Foxboro SCADA virtual team[s].  Located in many far flung cities, and more as an International group of friends/colleagues with a common purpose to support the Foxboro SCADA brand.  This year there are many long term colleagues as well as some new faces.  Without facebook and linkedIn or even our Invensys iShare portal it can be a struggle to put a face to a name or a voice to a name and a face on those late night conference calls.

Foxboro SCADA have an excellent distributed team with a positive helpful outlook.  Each member of the immediate product support team is located in many cities from many different countries.  Let me list them here.... but in particular - a special thanks to Patrizia and Simon, Joe and Fred, Shahid and Lu who really have put in an amazing effort daily.

USA, UK, ITALY, INDIA, CHINA, AUSTRALIA

For those of you who celebrate thanksgiving, have a great and happy holiday with your friends.  For those of you who don't you can breathe easy for a few days until the full distributed virtual team is back on deck.

Thankyou and bless all of our customers and our regional delivery and sales teams for your support and encouragement throughout the last year.

Chris Smith
Sydney Australia

PS: We don't get the holiday here in Australia [although it did make it to Norfolk Island] but having lived and worked in USA many times our family continues to celebrate Thanksgiving here in Sydney as well.  It's a lot warmer and light well into the evening... a perfect way to spend a Saturday.

Photo ISLAND : courtesy by attribution from Sinead Friel : Flickr.com

Closing the cover door continued .. a User Initiated Innovation story.

About a year ago I blogged a post describing a User Initiated Innovation [UII] for the SCD5200.  An innovation can be defined as that intersection point where intuition meets invention and you get something new turning up.  The intuition here was obvious.  The door cover would not close when you continue to use thick 1mm2 wire with the higher levels [750v] insulation.. just not enough room. [ In the backblogs..."close the cover-door-click-please"]

The Foxboro SCD5200 Remote Terminal Unit

Now, a year hence.. I thought time to revisit progress on this and portray some of the comparative results so far.

Changing the Good Oil Remotely - Foxboro Evo Maintain on the SCD2200



Design Variations can hinder operation and maintenance

Occasionally developers find it useful to add enhancements to a product, adding some esoteric variation and new set of use cases.  This can happen often with systems level products, oweing to the almost infinite variety of NEW NEW end user configurations which can be achieved.

 

Toward the end of last week on my return to Australia, I visited Bondi Beach in Sydney and took the pilgrimage around the headland which was hosting the annual 'Sculptures by the Sea' event.  There among the hundred odd sculptures scattered around the cliff walk was a car which had been shall we say 'enhanced' by the addition of various pipes and structures.  The topology of the thing would definitely give your average maintenance technician a headache, probably which could only be resolved by a swim with the sharks or a welding torch.

 

Changing Guard with Foxboro Evo Protect

SAFE - AVAILABLE - SECURE

People take protective measures to guard something important to their daily lives and take care of others involved in it's operation. To protect means to make someone/thing/group safe from harm, ensure continuing availability and provide security from attack. These three aspects are embodied in the Foxboro Evo PROTECT activities.

We changed recently from having control and safety systems to having Protect and Operate systems as part of the set.  Mapping these to traditional systems

	Foxboro Evo
System	Protect	Operate
Security	Y
Supervisory	Y	Y
Control		Y
Safety	Y
Protection	Y

• Protection systems are traditional in the utility and power sectors and generally provide real-time monitoring and extremely rapid action against transient events such as overload, underfrequency and overfrequency, protecting equipment and powerlines directly.
• Safety systems are more aligned to protection of plant and people in process control, where chemical processes can become uncontrolled and endanger plant and personnel.
• Security systems are becoming more tightly integrated with all aspects of computer [cyber] based control systems and are designed to protect against malicious attack and denial of service.
• Supervisory Systems provide remote supervisory control, however through the use of necessarily public or unsecured communications systems require the use of securely authenticated communications protocols to protect communications.

The combination of all systems relating therefore to maximizing availability, maximising personnel safety and maximizing system security while protecting the installed assets make sense and this therefore represents the core of the Foxboro Evo : PROTECT system.

PROTECT activities can also be extended into the application layer for particular industry segments.  In upstream oil and gas for example, the following protection activities can apply:-

• Environmental Protection - Leak Detection in Pipelines [Transient]
• Environmental Protection - Blowout prevention on Wells [Transient and Permanent]
• Personnel Safety - Safety Shutdown of Well Systems with H2S entrained
• Communications Protection - Use of DNP Secure Authentication Application, Use of secure Wireless Communications

Key Benefits of Foxboro Evo PROTECT

• Ensure continuously safe, available, secure operations
• Prevent an incident before it happens
• Enable fast responses to faults at every level
• Unify safety and control user experience, without jeopardizing hardware integrity

Key Capabilities

• Intelligent integration of the world’s leading emergency shutdown system provides an option for integrated control and safety functionality, available through a single operator interface
• No single point of hardware and software failure
• Pervasive redundancy in hardware and software optimizes system availability and reduces risk
• State-of-the-art cyber security hardening is designed and implemented throughout the system to enhance risk reduction

With Foxboro Evo we believe it is important to understand the way in which multiple systems integrate without compromising function in order to provide the complete protective system.  Cyber security, Safety and Protection systems combine forces to provide a complete protection of people, assets and information in order to maximise safety security and availability.  Think over the change in the way of looking at things with Foxboro Evo by reviewing the link.

This changing of the guard topic is a useful anchor for any commentary on the new methodology of Foxboro Evo Protect. If you have any constructive comments these will be published alongside this blog posting.



Photo Attrib. CC Indigo Girl : Flickr.com