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Don Clark, Schneider Electric

The IoT of Automation - A Totally New Way to Look at Control and Automation in the Process Industries

The future of process automation technology as we know it is slowly disappearing. The challenges of process control – to keep a process safe and operating to design to produce economic value for the asset owners – will always persist and will never go away. But, how we solve/address those challenges – i.e. the platform on which the control is executed, ie the “automation” – will radically change in the future. The forces of economics and evolving technology are pushing automation relentlessly toward a future of highly intelligent autonomous cyber physical systems (CPS), networked in a manner that enables their interaction and interoperability and maintains absolute security. This concept is called the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This paper will explore what “IIoT” will mean for process control and the automation industry, where the “intelligence” to achieve this objective is being pushed further and further down the architecture, and the traditional process control “Levels” (Levels 0 to 6 of the Purdue Reference Model) are being compressed over time closer to the valve and the sensor, and ultimately into the process assets themselves, and “Levels” will no longer mean “networks”, but rather describe functionality.  
 
Presentation slides

 

Biography

Don Clark is Vice President and Schneider Fellow for Schneider Electric’s Process Automation business.  He obtained his BS degree in Chemistry at California State University, Fullerton in 1973, and his MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Houston, Texas, in 1975.  Don has over 40 years of user experience on the IT side of process operations with various companies including Rohm and Haas Chemical, 3M, Honeywell, and AspenTech.  In 2005, he joined Invensys which was acquired by Schneider Electric in 2014. Don became a Schneider Senior Technical Fellow in 2015, and has a broad background in the heavy process industries with special emphasis in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and hydrocarbon processing especially as regards process operations from both a technology and business perspective.  He is a member of both ISA and IEC, and represents Schneider on the ISA S95 Steering Committee, serving as its Co-Chairman, and is a USA-Expert on the Global ISO/IEC Joint Working Group to internationalize this standard.  He’s also a member of the IEC TC65E Ad Hoc Group 1 on SmartManufacturing.   Don has served for many years on the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Department of Chemical Engineering Industry Advisory Board.

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