There were quite a few noteworthy presentations at ARC’s 20th Annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando in February. One presentation in particular stimulated considerable discussion among process control end-users and suppliers alike. This was Don Bartusiak’s keynote presentation on ExxonMobil’s vision for a totally new open, standards-based process automation platform. For those readers who do not know Don, he is the chief engineer for process control at ExxonMobil (Downstream) Research & Engineering.
“I’d like to present the big picture here,” Dr. Bartusiak began. “The problem we’re trying to solve is, ‘How can we take the cost out of our process control projects for both system replacements and greenfield projects?’”
What is wrong with the status quo?
“So what’s wrong with the status quo?” he asked rhetorically. “In a nutshell, it’s too expensive for us to upgrade our process control systems and we’re just not getting enough value from them. Most of the recent enhancements we’ve made were for level 3 applications that reside above the control systems.” Bartusiak also noted that a significant percentage of ExxonMobil Refining and Chemical’s control systems will face obsolescence over the next decade.
Getting right to the point, he said, “So why not simply replace these systems with a state-of-the-art DCS?” He gave five reasons:
• The high cost of “technology refresh” limits access to leading edge performance.
• It is too expensive to integrate third-party components.
• There is limited liquidity in the application market and a lack of sophisticated development tools.
• Solutions come bundled, versus best-in-class.
• Rather than being built in and intrinsic; the current security model is bolted on.
A new approach
To find solutions, ExxonMobil “looked outside our little world,” Bartusiak explained. “We saw opportunities for improvement through open architectures and virtualisation; not just for engineering, but also to provide new ways for process control. We saw a constructive revolution taking place in the defence avionics industry by transitioning from a proprietary ‘stovepipe’ model to an open and interoperable, standards-based system architecture. We saw IoT and wireless changing management expectations, with questions such as, ‘Why do we even need control systems anymore?’ And we are seeing new solutions for the security challenge from innovators, some of whom are here at the ARC Forum.”
He presented his organisation’s vision for standards-based, open, secure, and interoperable control systems that would:
• Promote innovation and value creation.
• Effortlessly integrate best-in-class components.
• Afford access to leading-edge capability and performance.
• Preserve the asset owner’s application software.
• Significantly lower the cost of future replacement.
• Employ an adaptive intrinsic security model.
Bartusiak emphasised that this vision for open automation was applicable for both brownfield and greenfield facilities; was consistent with ExxonMobil Upstream’s “It Just Happens,” vision; would involve no compromises in safety, security, or availability; and most importantly, the goal is to create a commercially available system (rather than one just limited to ExxonMobil) that would be applicable to all current DCS markets.
Why Lockheed Martin?
Next, Bartusiak addressed the obvious question of why ExxonMobil decided to work with Lockheed Martin, a name rarely heard in the process control world, to supplement its internal resources for this critically important initiative. He explained that when the company looked around, it found the work of the Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium very appealing. Lockheed Martin is a founding member of this joint government-industry consortium, which was formed in 2010 as a government and industry partnership to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. The FACE Technical Standard is the open avionics standard for making military computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure.
Obviously, Bartusiak and the rest of the ExxonMobil team realised that a similar approach could be extremely beneficial for the process control industry. In addition to its deep familiarity with FACE; Lockheed Martin had extensive expertise designing and implementing real-time, high-availability, deterministic open systems. In November 2015, ExxonMobil awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to serve as the systems integrator for early stage development.
Next steps
In January of this year, ExxonMobil and Lockheed Martin held an “Industry Day” event for suppliers to test the industry’s appetite for this type of solution. Despite a major snowstorm that buried the Washington, D.C. area, the vast majority of interested parties still managed to attend. “We received far more qualifying questions than we anticipated and it will take some time to respond to all of them.” According to Bartusiak, the next step is to solicit interest and support from other prospective users.
“We plan to build a laboratory prototype in 2016,” he said. “Beyond 2016, we would like to see a technically ready solution in 2018 and a fit-for-purpose system in 2019.”
For more information contact Paul Miller, ARC Advisory Group, +1 781 471 1141, pmiller@arcweb.com, www.arcweb.com
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