Engineering the Semantic Plant

Engineering complex close fitting encapsulated control systems for plants requires the incorporation of a number of data capture and review processes to eliminate the post start up operational risk as early as possible in the project time frame.

While the 'semantic web' continues to take shape with SPARQL and RDP/OWL databases and their definition taking shape in ISO 15926 construction communities, Invensys is building up the core tools, templates, rules bases and workbench processes to take on larger and larger plant designs in collaboration with it's customers.

Reflected Doyle Spirals - F Decomite [Flickr] [ CC ]

The Doyle Spiral as depicted in Reflected Doyle Spirals beautifully traces the packing of ever increasing circle size in sets of interlocking coloured spirals. These sets have aspects of encapsulation, increasing scale, close fitting components and simple recursive rules to define their behaviour. It is my view that engineering highly scalar control and safety systems follows similar structures, and as such, we might keep in mind how best to frame the close fitting data exchanges between different companies and engineering teams in order to make them equally elegant.

Universal IO - Then end of the Marshalling Panel

Ever since the ability to quickly compute and the creation of electronic configurations, we've seen companies struggle with trying to quickly develop consistent configurations from a top down logical design basis.  The advent of object oriented systems has enabled configuration to be partitioned in uniquely named environments.  If only the real world would comply with the lovely abstract designs we have on the computer screen.

Christmas Wishes

CHRISTMASTIME SYDNEY HARBOUR 2012

Dear Readers,

Wouldn't you like to get away from the office, down to Sydney Harbour for a few hours in the sunshine ? Yes folks, down-under it is summer in Sydney at Christmas.

These days, I am sure you would agree it is hard to get all the office people together, with the kind of hectic travel schedules that modern corporate engineering demands.  Some in our office, including yours truly have spent up to 150 days travelling this year, and we as is customary each year, we planned to get our local office colleagues together and chat one on one about how things worked out.

The Invensys Sydney team, put away the laptops and tablets during the week and boarded "The Southern Swan" for a Christmas lunch.  This ship, a tall ship originally from Denmark c 1922, but still cruising around Sydney Harbour some 90 years later, is a fully rigged ship [with an engine] and sails and ropes and interesting bits and pieces nautical.

It had been raining hard in the days prior and there was a worry that our team combined with about 60 other tourists might have to cram down in the hold below deck or scramble under a kind of tarpaulin if the rain continued to pour down. Some of our team came to the dock sporting large brightly colored branded nylon jackets [souvenir's of long completed SCADA projects].

But the seagulls were flying and we ended up on a sunny afternoon, a few clouds, light breeze and a place down the stern of the boat to swap yarns about fish that got away.

With this simple postcard, would like to wish all the people that interact with us at Invensys Operations Management in any way, a happy and joyful Christmas time and we will be back with more entertaining, enlightening, and educational blog stories in the New Year.

Sincerely,

Chris J Smith


Invensys SCADA portfolio