Jack Bolick, president of Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS), opened this year’s Honeywell User Group Meeting in Phoenix stressing the company’s mission of safety, reliability, and efficiency and how the company’s new products and services are focused on addressing these issues according to direct customer input.

Explaining how Honeywell takes customer input throughout the year and incorporates it into new product releases, Jason Bottjen from Valero, the Experion Customer Advisory Board Co-Chair, noted that HPS sponsors 14 advisory boards that host 350 customers from 24 countries. Bottjen added that the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is introducing a new “virtual CAB” this year, with online surveys where customers can interactively provide input each month at www.letstalkprocesscontrol.com.

Following on Bolick’s opening comments regarding HPS’s mission, Jason Urso, vice president of technology for HPS, provided an overview of Honeywell’s new technology announcements, including:

• R310 updates to Experion featuring Safety Manager integration to provide common Experion HMI access to both the plant safety system and controllers (regardless of the variety of field devices in place) as well as peer-to-peer communication between the C300 controller and Safety Manager over fault-tolerant Ethernet; the new release of Experion Batch Manager, which is capable of being run on the C300 controller (rather than on a server), resulting in 8-10% higher throughput, 80% reduction in phase transition, and 15-20% greater production levels; and consolidation of alarms using a new alarm configuration management tool, which permits operators to focus on high priority alarms while shelving lower level alarms to be addressed at a later time.
• OneWireless R110—a multifunctional, scalable, and standards-compliant network that can interface with wireless instruments, cameras, and sensors to extend the control room to mobile operators and engineers. OneWireless is designed to be ready for the 110.11 release once it is finalized and comes with a HART gateway that allows any sensor on the network to appear to the operator as a HART device for ease of system management.

Urso also noted that Honeywell has no plans to set an “end of life date” for either the C200 controller or the TDC 3000.

“Honeywell looks at the DCS with a 30-year timeframe in mind,” Urso said, “supporting incremental migration to new technologies when the customer is ready, with no downtime and preservation of intellectual property in the system.”

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