IMC-2017 RAP Talk - 19:07
by Peter Martin, Schneider Electric Process Automation

As the science behind process control advanced over the past 4 decades, the equipment assets in industrial plants were pushed to, and at times beyond, reliability threshold limits. This led to the need for new and more advanced approaches to asset management. As a result, the science behind asset management has advanced significantly over the last 15 years. New approaches to equipment condition monitoring, predictive maintenance and prescriptive maintenance have proven their worth in terms of improved equipment reliability.

The rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is providing new opportunities to consider improving asset performance. With the reduced, cost, size, and power requirements, coupled with increased capability, capacity and interconnectivity of computer technology, new, highly agile automation system architectures are emerging which align tightly with the asset architectures of industrial plants and enterprises. This means that powerful computers in the form of cyber-physical systems can be aligned to individual industrial assets providing incredible compute power for each asset. Additionally, the expansion of control functionality from process and logic control for improved operational efficiency, to include the real-time control of reliability risk and operational profitability to provide the basic components of Asset Performance Control.

This IIoT-enabled, expanded control domain will operate under Asset Performance Management to provide new levels of measurable operational profitability from equipment assets all the way through entire industrial enterprises.