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Remote monitoring boosts process visibility, security
Whether covering 100 feet or 100 miles, remote monitoring enables operators to determine the status or condition of a process, operation or event without leaving the control room. Remote information can be as simple as the confirmation that a door, valve or damper is open or closed. It can be as complex as multiple measurements that feed into sophisticated calculations.
 “Organizations in all industries can implement [remote] monitoring and realize real and significant benefits,” said David Crump, marketing communications manager at Opto 22, Temecula, CA. “What industries can’t benefit from remote monitoring? It’s pretty much a given that the more one knows about what’s going on with the organization, its assets and all that [occurs] on the plant floor, the better able one is to make smart decisions regarding how to improve production processes, maintain equipment, etc.”
“We are seeing many industries such as power where the assets are distributed, yet centrally managed,” said Dane Overfield, product development lead at Exele Information Systems, Inc. in East Rochester, NY. “Remote monitoring is required to permit central management of these assets.”
Of the many remote monitoring issues end users must consider, the top four are security, connectivity, data quality and alarm management. Security
“Security and safety concerns are the most frequent issues raised by customers,” said John Schroeder, remote services business development manager at ABB. “Advances in technology have been made to address these issues, and it is now a matter of conveying this information and demonstrating the technology to overcome these issues.”
“How does one securely access the control system to monitor what’s going on and what type of privileges are given that person to monitor, operate or configure changes remotely?” asked Bruce Jensen, manager of systems marketing and sales support at Yokogawa Corp. of America, Sugar Land, TX. “This is an exercise in itself in configuring role-based usage of remote access and the networking communication privileges that go with it. That security issue goes farther to be able to adequately audit what the remote user is doing – or has done – so tracking mechanisms are important.”
“The security policy employed by anyone providing remote services should ensure that parties are authenticated and authorized for access,” said Marilyn Guhr, performance services business development manager at Honeywell, Phoenix, AZ. “One of the primary challenges of providing remote services to external entities [customers] is the ability to adhere to that entity’s corporate security policies.”
“A big mistake that end users make is using encryption as the sole method of security for an application,” said Chris Hines, product support engineer for ProSoft Technology, Bakersfield, CA. According to Hines, easy methods for adding security to a network include:
- Use only the transmit power required because the more power used, the farther the signal will travel
- MAC filtering. MAC IDs can be 'spoofed,’ but this is still an easy means of adding security
- Do not broadcast SSID. In terms of overall security, this contributes only moderately.
Connectivity
Security and connectivity tend to go hand-in-hand. Scott Owen, manager of technical support at Rockwell Automation, said that a remote monitoring system should offer a connectivity strategy to deal with disparate automation systems. “Disparate automation systems require a great deal of engineering and hardware cost to implement connectivity and data collection,” said Owen. However, he said a current trend is that companies have greater acceptance of third party connectivity to automation systems.
“In general, adoption rate for remote monitoring is expected to continue to grow,” said Steve Johansen, performance services business development manager at Honeywell. “The ease of connectivity continues to improve; the security of these connections is now field proven; and the incremental cost of wider connectivity continues to decline.”
“Though not necessarily new, the use of commercial-off-the-shelf PC-utilizing Microsoft products in control systems and Microsoft’s enhancement in their server OS contribute to the ability to easily implement remote monitoring functionality,” said Jensen. “Administration can be centralized without the need for someone to load client software.
“Also, the use of Ethernet-based camera servers allow real-time video to be embedded in the control system and integrated to the HMI,” continued Jensen. “These Ethernet-based cameras are connected to camera servers that control multiple units. The servers are Java-based and allow control of video (zoom, pan, brightness, etc) using java applets through a simple thin client such as Internet Explorer.” Quality of data
Data quality management is extremely important. Reliability of the data is one of the most important elements of remote monitoring, according to Overfield. “The remote user needs to know that the information provided is up-to-date,” he said.
“You are bringing a lot of information to a small number of people. You can get into a 'garbage-in, garbage-out’ problem very quickly if you don’t manage your data quality very carefully,” explained Dave Shook, chief technology officer at Matrikon, Edmonton, Alberta. “By data quality, I mean both the configuration data and the real-time monitoring data.
“What we have seen is people not paying enough attention to the management of change over time,” Shook said. “As facilities change, ensure the information in the configuration of the remote monitoring system is kept up to date. As soon as you have bad quality information in your remote monitoring system, you will end up with false alarms or false absence alarms.” Alarm management
The credibility of remote monitoring systems tends to be judged on their ability to handle alarms. Generally, end users have less confidence in remote monitoring if it has a high degree of nuisance alarms. However, nuisance alarms are not always inherently the fault of the remote monitoring system. Problems also can arise in the way they are implemented and/or managed by end-users. If managed properly, alarms should warn or advise operators when action is required. Proper alarm system design, implementation, operation and maintenance are critical in preventing a minor disruption from escalating into a major incident.
According to Overfield, over-alarming is one of the typical mistakes end users make. “If a notification infrastructure exists to alert remote users, intelligent configuration is required to prevent over-notification of events and abnormal conditions,” he said.
“Generally, alarm management is very important to remote monitoring because you tend to have quite a lot of infrastructure being spent on making the remote monitoring happen,” Shook said. “You have highly trained specialists actually doing the remote monitoring. And they are monitoring a large number of usually quite high value added items.” Using wireless for remote monitoring
One of the widest uses of up-and-coming wireless technology is remote monitoring. “Probably the newest 'thing’ in remote monitoring is the application of emerging technologies, such as wireless, said Guhr. “In order to perform more detailed remote diagnostics, additional local data inputs may be required. Wireless sensors and devices are typically the most cost effective mechanism to obtain these additional inputs on previously installed equipment and process applications in industrial facilities. Because these data readings are not critical to process control functions (e.g. they are only being used for diagnostics) these are ideal candidates for wireless solutions.”
“Plants that cannot afford to run more twisted-pair copper wire but need to add additional instrumentation or controls could benefit from wireless,” said Scott Saunders, vice president of Moore Industries. “Natural gas producers often have remote sites that are miles from electrical power. Monitoring systems have to run on solar power and survive environmental extremes. Plants that must monitor remote equipment, such as tank farms, weather stations, effluent discharges, etc. also can benefit. This is a particularly difficult problem in places like nuclear plants, where cable is often buried.”
“Wireless over Ethernet (Wireless LAN) and wireless wide area network (cellular) technologies in particular are being increasingly deployed to solve the 'remote’ part of the remote monitoring challenge,” said Crump. “Sometimes monitoring is desired but the asset, system or piece of equipment to be monitored is located in a secluded part away from where there might be installed wiring. In these cases, wireless routers, radio modems, wireless I/O units, cellular radios and/or other wireless devices can be made to work together to establish connectivity and enable the monitoring.”
Installing a wireless system for remote monitoring is not always as simple as turning on the power. “Attempting to install a wireless system without doing a 'site survey’ is a huge mistake sometimes resulting in a waste of time and money,” warned Saunders. “In a site survey, a consultant or vendor brings wireless equipment to the plant and determines if it is possible to send information via wireless from Point A to Point B.”
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