Foxboro’s SDA DCS (P278)

And, you know, as we think back, I also am one of the hosts of the Automation Museum website.

a history of automation podcast.

And one of the things we look at when products first came out, there were no standards.

And so companies had to create new products that addressed what was happening in the field.

But over time, you know, when multiple companies were producing multiple products, that's when You know, people started saying, wouldn't this be great if they could communicate to each other? And then standards started coming out.

We started seeing open networks.

And now we're in the age, it seems like, of open automation, where actually platforms like the one you're going to talk to us about have openness built into it, right? And so the design from the ground up to be...

I don't know, flexible, easy to access, easy to connect to.

And so, you know, we heard previously in a previous podcast of what that means more on the smaller discrete side of automation.

So now as we take a look at distributed control systems, process automation, and those types of fields, can you tell us a little bit more about what you're launching, what you just launched?

Absolutely.

And so a lot of those fundamentals that you talked to Hany about on your most recent podcast on this topic, a lot of those fundamentals is really the philosophy that we took from the very beginning when we were designing and coming up with the concepts around Foxborough SDA.

And so I'll just kind of reiterate a little bit what those concepts are.

One is flexibility and freedom in terms of hardware selection.

So we will continue to produce automation processors, IO, and the various components that go into a distributed control system network.

But there's also the challenge that comes with existing systems whereby the software, the runtime, is always tied to a very specific piece of hardware.

So what that means is, you know, when we as a manufacturer or one of our competitors are dealing with an end of life or a chipset challenge in terms of manufacturing controllers, that spares management.

that timeline is always dictated by the manufacturer.

We are saying, okay, this is when this ends, and you must switch to the next generation of controller, for example.

And when it comes to hardware independence, that means that we need to create build time and run time environments that can be managed, can be run, and can be deployed on different hardware targets that are fit for purpose.

And what that really opens up then is, is we can have a system where we have the same DCS runtime environment that's running on your cracking unit inside your refinery.

So you've got all of the high availability, disaster avoidance requirements that go on with that.

But on the same network, using the same build time and runtime environment, we have an RTU that's sitting on a pump that's out in the field.

So, you know, something much more simplistic in terms of the amount of compute power that's required there.

Well, we can use the same runtime and scale it down to run there rather than, you know, not very cost effective to say, use another DCS controller just to do this one pump application as part of the network.