Combining Image Capture with Monitoring

I'd been looking around for an article on the relationship between image capture and more conventional

Hi Tech on Australia's oldest bridge

measurement and instrumentation.

In SCADA systems there have been instances I recall where image capture can be triggered by door movement for security purposes.  The door opens, the person or animal coming in [yes Kangaroos can open doors] triggers an image capture - where the image captured is then uploaded to the central control room.

Software Patents Determination of Interest

Is it time to re-think Patents ?

Read in CNN Tech today that a legal determination had been made re 'computer implemented inventions'.  The judgement decision was against and Australian companies seeking legal patent protection for an Idea re-implemented in software.  This was turned down where the basic argument quoted was:-

"Merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention," said Justice Clarence Thomas.

Interesting and we wait to see what happens next given that many Software Companies may look again at what can be Patented effectively.  It looks like mere transformation of an abstract idea by generic computer implementation will not henceforth not make the cut.

Of course in the systems group we are continually transforming abstract ideas into reality.  Sometimes it requires the use of software and sometimes hardware components.  The Bas Relief in the photo - patents look to be child's play.  Somehow I'm not sure Software companies will see it quite like that in the future.

Here is a brief history on PATENTs which I also thought summarized things well..
Boston College Link Presentation on History of Patents

Photo by takomabibelot entitled Terra-Cotta Bas Relief By Caspar Buberl In The Old Patent Office Great Hall (Washington, DC) under licence cc by 2.0

After the 1877 fire, six allegorical reliefs by Buberl were installed in the Great Hall (just outside the Model Hall). Accompanying this allegory of "Industry and Invention" are reliefs depicting Fire, Electricity and Magnetism, Water, Agriculture, and Mining.

Playing DICE with Dr Diesel's Moteur to reduce CO2 Intensity

The Plaque at Musee des Arts et Metiers - Paris

When you look at causality between Carbon in the atmosphere climbing rapidly since the industrial revolution and seemingly going over the top of the 'carbon budget' (the point at which global warming and climate change become uncontrollable), there has to be a way to make the production of energy more efficient vs amount of produced atmospheric Carbon.

The search for a more efficient combustion engine has been since the many trials and failed engines invented by Rudolf Diesel. The world owes much to Dr Diesel for getting us started with what must be one of the most prolific work engines used throughout the world today.  Recently there has been work done to improve the engine to take alternate forms of black liquid fuel.

Back to BauHaus

Convergence

So far when I think of Windows 8 as a possibility for control systems visualization I think mainly of the International Style and it's Euro roots in Bauhaus and the re-interpretation of that in the way in which Microsoft Windows 8 is designed.

So.. Many interactive surfaces or UIs as they are now known are starting to converge using similar design principles to allow their convergence, not only as individual user experiences, but to allow those same users to shift between for example mobile phones, tablets, PC, video walls and allow the user to interact and re-design their experience to a certain level within a design principles framework.

In our own space, the design fault lines are evaporating rapidly between SCADA, SAFETY and CONTROL.

This in such a way that it won't be too long before even this blog has to be renamed into something more convergent with Foxboro's control product .... Foxboro Evo.

Photo: CC Licence : by Dalbera on Flickr for Convergence (Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine)

What just happened and why ? - Unravel the domino effect with SOEs in SCADA

The Domino Effect

From at least the early 1990s when I discovered SCADA so to speak, I wondered what on earth SCADA meant by Sequence of Events and tended to reject the whole idea until I understood why ?

I had come myself from a world of real-time control when everything was current to the actual time and data from one controller was highly sequenced with that of another.  The era of the PLC and it's great contribution to sequencing of - read inputs, calculate logic, write outputs was a pretty fundamental design I had thought.

Are you Alert or just Waiting dear M2M machine

ALERT

Are you alert, or is it just waiting for the situation to pass.  Are you alert for something which might happen, something perhaps with danger requiring your constant situational awareness, or is it just waiting for the expected alarm when the pressure gets to high.

To what extent we confuse normal events, like the sun coming up and the sun going down with an alert meaning something just broke and you are in trouble or security was breached and you need to shutdown or burn everything.

Alerts are the output of a process which is monitoring the 'danger' domain, and the production of alerts needs to be meaningful, particularly when possibly mixed with Alarms, Events, Off-Normals and basic normal data.

How might we best characterize them ?

• Normal Data : No need to look at it - no need to act - maybe to fine tune - maybe to optimize, but no real danger involved and not a high priority.
• Event Data : Events record what happens, usually on a change of status of an item of plant, or perhaps an operator action for later audit purposes.
• ALARM : Alarms record a transgression of a limit or potential hazard developing.  Alarms are useful for managing situations post a disturbance event.
• ALERT : Alerts are a new category for most and I like to refer to Alerts as being from a higher form of intelligence and or situational awareness which characterize and inform of imminent danger or unexpected behaviour.

When observing animal behavior in the wild, you will see that the animal engages all of it's senses and the senses of it's herd to determine whether there is danger or not.  Animals often go from relaxed or waiting to high stages of alert within seconds based on the situation.  It is generally not just one input, but many which need to be correlated to determine that 'danger exists' and it is the function of 'situational assessment' to figure out whether 'danger' could exist.

Whether real-time systems are intelligent enough to correlate enough data to provide a higher level of reasoning required for an ALERT is a debate to be had, however we are now approaching the levels of computing and industrial software capability to provide a higher order ALERT system rather than the simpler more fundamental Data, Events and Alarm systems currently implemented.

Photo: Alert by paralog  under licence CC BY-ND 2.0

Man vs Machine

Alert ! - situational awareness, the concept of knowing a complex dynamic
situation and being able to decide and act on it quickly, and more importantly, decide better and faster than the adversary would have.  Situational Awareness[SA] seems to have derived out of aerial combat and the complex spaces which arise in air traffic control towers.  More recently there have been some papers written about the application to the complex dynamic situations which can now arise in the modern industrial/process control room.

 who is the enemy ?

It all seems good, however I wonder if there is a basic premise that is being missed.

John Boyd, a great military strategist defined the OODA [Observe Orient Decide Act] loop for the benefit of better understanding how combatant strategies can be modelled and their interaction determined. Situational Awareness has adopted this model and defines itself as the state of knowledge pertaining to a dynamic situation or filtering of that knowledge to enable fast strategic decisions to be made.  Shifting from the military domain to the industrial domain, one is left wondering how situational awareness in the classic sense really applies. Who is the enemy ?

For the military situation, an fighter's strategy or tactics are in play continually against the enemy, yet in the plant, the operator is not pitted against an intelligent machine [at least not yet] but rather has to control the machine for an emerging situation which might generally be unforeseen.  The operator's frame is not continually shifting, but dealing with well know operational points.

Some of the process of Situational Assessment, or the gathering of appropriate data to enable fast real-time operational decisions to be made should be effective for control rooms, but the requirement to continually shift the awareness frame based on an enemy counter strategy seems not to apply.
Therefore - does the rest of the whole set of situational awareness technologies really apply ?

Feel free to comment on situational awareness in general and more specifically the way it might work for your control room situation.

References
The role of Situation Awareness for the Operators of Process Industry Salman Nazir, Simone Colombo, Davide Manca*

John Boyd's OODA Loop Wiki

Grow Grow Grow !

Wednesday Jan 29th @ Wonderware, Irvine, CA: "Grow! Grow! Grow!" -  Jean-Pascal Tricoire [JPT] as CEO Schneider Electric spoke eloquently about how in just 100 days or so, we Invensys were to become Schneider-Electric.  Just days before, my laptop logon screen had already gone Green and I was already feeling the love. Daft Punk won a Grammy with 'Get Lucky' which is how I feel right now.  I feel that Invensys 'gets lucky' becoming Schneider Electric.  JPT explained just how Global Schneider Electric really is and introduced us all to some of the new top management.  It felt good actually.  I liked the language of welcoming into the Schneider 'Citizen'.  One almost feels that with over 100K employees globally, large companies take on a certain 'citizenry'.

We make Automation Systems at Invensys.  Very large systems which operate to optimize and stabilize the control of high energy processes like refining, power generation, LNG production, Oil and Gas Production. It was refreshing to hear of the large number of engineers already in Schneider Electric which will get to know some of us Invensys people as we start to work alongside them, become their world so to speak.  It isn't going to be just one way.  When one thing becomes the other, both lose an element of their former identity and evolve through change to be something greater and better than before.  This is the change we are about to embark on.

An objective command to 'Grow' has to have a rationale that would appeal to the massive customer base as well as the teams of distributed engineers who have to make it happen.  One concept which resonated was the idea of being the 'sustainable' engineering company. You can see this goes deep - if you just check out the Schneider Electric / About page.  Making state of the art technology to effect the sustainable aspirations and plans of customers.  We make automation technology and we build large systems which either use transform or create large amounts of energy.  It looks like we, becoming Schneider Electric we will have access to a much wider range of technology and will be able, with imagination, provide higher levels of sustainable automation - and be more becoming to our customers.

Invensys is running at a higher energy level now - lets see how we do as we become Schneider Electric.

PS: Check out the Schneider Electric ICL - International Customer Lounge - What a concept !
International Customer Lounge

Categorizing things...

Comments on whether you prefer to categorize in one of the following ways:-

• - Single - a very existential approach - to be or not to be...
• - Dual - It's either this thing or that [only two choices]
• - Triple - It's this or that or the other [no one likes to be the other]

I found that categorizing things in hierarchical groups of 3 enables us to make sense of prioritization with a minimum number of levels. For example the hierarchy shown above Things -> {Numbers{Even, Prime,Other}, Colors{Purple,Cyan,Blue}, Shapes{Circles, Rectangles,_}}.

Remote Control Modes - Local vs Remote

This amounts to a short note really.  

Nothing too mind bending, just the usual confusion with language we sometimes have....

Often Control Selectors and Mode switches are provided to assist off-normal operation or maintenance.

These days most control is done remotely, with Local control being the abnormal case.

Local control refers to the control you do when you are remotely located ? Doesn't make a lot of sense linguistically at least. 

So LOCAL really means LOCAL to the controlled Equipment.  REMOTE means controlled remotely from the MCR/PCR/MCC etc. normally a remote central location.

Of course we have confused the issue somewhat with the choice of language in SCADA where Supervisory control is managed from the REMOTE control location, and the Remote Terminal Units [RTU] are provided in the locality of the equipment.

So what of a Remote/Local control switch ?

A Remote/Local control selector switch can often be situated in proximity to the controlled plant [i.e. LOCAL to the equipment] and allow an operator to take control locally and avoid the need to interact or accept remote supervisory commands.

Switching the Selector to REMOTE allows the equipment to be controlled REMOTELY from a SCADA Master Station.

The important point to remember is that LOCAL always refers to the locality of the actual equipment.

If you have a particularly fine example of local control remote/local selector switch that you would like to contribute a photo of, please feel free to make a comment or send an email.

Happy Christmas.

Chris Smith

Sydney, Australia

Harry's Christmas Indigo collection

Water was what Harry was worried about. More specifically the effectiveness of it at his secret Indium mine site. Harry had something going wrong with the collection of Indium from the falls water, which was bad. His whole process was based on collecting the metal after heavy rains in a remote area.

Harry had come up with an autonomous process which extracted the rare metal directly from a stream of water flowing over the zinc/indium ore bearing rocks. Still unsure as to why there would be an unusually high concentration of Indium, Harry was not bothered.  All he had to do was make sure the tanks collected the water at the right time and flow rate and then run a solar powered concentration process on site remotely.  Every year he would go up the mountain and collect, just in time for Christmas.

This year things were not working out. The collection timing was wrong, all the equipment was working, but the collections were just not making it.

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

At the launch of Foxboro Evo

Beyond the great Gatsby ! some of the team of Evo genius at the launch in San Antonio this week!

This changes Everything !

As does the neon shirt !

With Foxboro classic Steven Golemme as Evo Genius , Chris Smith as The Alamo and Rod Wetcsh, Steering us around the change.

Water wheel Art Fashion in Brunei

Forecourt Fountain in Gadong Brunei

Spent a few days in Brunei just now.  Invensys has longstanding customers and installations there.

 

The hotel forecourt in Gadong had an interesting water feature. Curious I went out into the early morning sunshine and was attracted to it's design combination of Arabic and Asian ideas.

 

Soon, there came a young lady dressed in a kind of brightly colored neon Arabic dress who was carefully cleaning around the outside of the fountain. Curious to see the dynamics of the fountain, I leaned over the edge to try to rotate the chrome plated water wheels on the sides of the dry glass columns.

 

"Does this fountain have water in it sometimes ?" I asked, kind of worried that I was probably not supposed to be messing around with the little water wheels, and maybe it was guests like me that broke it in the first place.

 

"I don't know.. but how are you Sir?", she said, smiling and happy conversing with a strange guy in a suit and tie, balanced on the parapet of the obviously dry water feature.

 

"Clearly a maintenance issue" I thought. "At least the wheels still turn !" I said.

 

"Yes, It was nice talking to you !" she said.  "Hope to see you again !"

 

Next time I must wear some brightly colored neon shirt and jump in !

 

 

 



More thoughts on the Hyperloop

Dear Hyperpassengers,



Static Electricity Demonstration in a Tube

Enjoyed reading the Hyperloop Alpha document on the slow old train yesterday. I had a few extra thoughts about some features not yet documented.

Static Electricity
The tube pressure is like stratospherically low.  About 1/1000th outside air pressure.  Such a low pressure would result in a extremely hyper dry air inside the tubes, since it is also significantly lower than the vapour pressure of water at that same temperature.  The pods in the hyperloop will carry us forward at sub-sonic .98 Mach speeds in a near vacuum. The electrodynamics and impact of the ultra-dry air inside the tube are not represented in the Alpha document so far. Look forward to gold plated pods which would conduct well enough to reduce the static effects transferred to the inside of the pods.  Love those electric fields in the lab, but you would not want the trip to be too hair raising.