Wireless: Big bang or slow burner?

Wireless sensor networks have huge potential in process control applications, offering cost savings by eliminating wiring and improving efficiency and decision-making through enhanced communications across plant and IT infrastructures.

However, evidence of a huge rush to embrace the technology in the process industries remains, at best, patchy, as few process operators, to date, have publicised details of wireless applications

Wireless equipment vendors insist that the publicised projects are the tip of an iceberg. There are, they insist, very many other projects being kept under wraps by operators to maximise the competitive advantage from adopting the technology.

Nevertheless, most analysts describe the process industry as staying cautious about the large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks, not least because of concerns over cyber security and the lack of standards.

Recent developments in the market are designed to go some way to allaying these concerns, not least the collaboration between IT giant Cisco and Emerson Process Management. Under the deal, Cisco and Emerson plan to offer open-standard solutions for wireless process and plant management applications for the process industries.

The wireless partnership, which combines significant capabilities in IT, business management and industrial management, is targeting key process issues such as productivity, safety and operational efficiency. However, its key element is the confidence and security offered by Cisco from its dominant position in the global IT market.

“If you speak to senior executives about what’s stopping them integrating the non-IT with the enterprise space, nine out of ten say ‘you show me that you can secure my production capabilities and we will do it tomorrow,’” said Stuart Robinson, manager, manufacturing vertical sector, Cisco Systems (UK) European markets.

“The enterprise space is in location A and the production space is in location B. We’re there as a pig-in-the-middle saying that, based on the new security firewalls, we can demonstrate that we can secure a production control [environment],” he added.

According to Robinson, Cisco’s partnership with Emerson aims to deliver operational excellence via innovative reference architectures that take real-time events and alerts all the way through to business applications, such as SAP.

“That means you are going to start to take out huge amounts of cost of the overall network, huge amounts of cost from IT that can potentially be invested elsewhere in the business. You can then start to really execute on operational excellence and increase your competitiveness in your own marketplace.”

Robinson went on to emphasise how Cisco has “verticalised” a lot of its business units to focus on selling into specific industries, as well as towards developing products and technologies for these markets. This, he said, was part of its commitment to the industrial market and to advancing Cisco’s position in non-IT areas.

The door could also be open for other vendors to form partnerships with Cisco, at least at some future stage. Robinson said the Emerson deal is the only collaboration “that we are working on right now”, adding that “Cisco does not do exclusive deals”.

The market is, meanwhile, waiting for the ISA-SP100 committee to finalise a universally accepted wireless standard, though it has seen progress with the release of the Wireless HART standard last September. The latter standard has attracted support from most vendors, with the notable exception of Honeywell.

According to Jean-Marie Alliet, director: sales support: EMEA at Honeywell Process Solutions, the company remains concerned that the HART standard does not support the full capabilities of its OneWireless system, particularly the use of mobile devices. He said: “The ISA-SP100 multifunctional approach to wireless systems gives more opportunities to fully exploit wireless. We will support SP100 whatever is in there and hope it will be settled fairly soon so everyone can use the technology. But we don’t want to restrict the use of wireless to field device systems alone.”

In contrast, Emerson is gearing up to accommodate Wireless HART and is preparing to release a range of devices that comply with the standard.

“We are confident and comfortable with implementing Wireless HART and feel that that is a protected path going forward in SP100 as well,” said David Dunbar, recently appointed president of Emerson Process Management Europe. “The SP100 committee has acknowledged that it is a standard that has to be encompassed within the broader scheme of things that it is looking at,” said Dunbar.

Emerson officials, meanwhile, believe that the process plant of the future could have Wireless Hart gateway in the network and Wireless Hart devices operating alongside pre-standard devices that are installed today.

“The industry has gone through this scenario before,” noted Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer, Emerson Process Management. “If you walk through the process plants of the world today you are going to find lots of instruments talking in many different protocols.

“When smart transmitters and digital wired communication first started there were a lot of vendor-specific protocols introduced, which customers bought and installed. When standards were evolved like HART or Fieldbus, they started adding new instruments that supported the standards, but didn’t rip out all of the ones that were working with the earlier protocols.”

According to Zornio, a similar scenario is going to occur with wireless: “If customers see value in implementing the devices today, they put in the devices with the technology and protocols that we have today and they get the value. When the standards come out, they move to the ones that support the protocol. I don’t think they are going to do wholesale changeouts just for the sake of getting it standardised in one area.”