EC: PlantPAx Modern Distributed Control System

The latest release of the PlantPAx modern DCS from Rockwell Automation helps industrial producers across multiple industries modernize their plants and reduce time-to-market. New system capabilities include a more productive design environment to enhance automation productivity; easier adoption of new enabling technologies to improve user experience; and enhanced control capabilities to help meet operational goals.

• Increased automation productivity: To provide operators with reliable and accurate system configuration, the system now includes expanded estimation, design and development guides. The updated documentation and design capabilities help dramatically increase automation productivity, decrease time to deploy a maintainable modern system, and reduce lifecycle costs.
• Improved user experience: Leveraging network improvements and built-in mobility, the PlantPAx system delivers an improved, reliable user experience. Expanded industrial Ethernet switches support Layer 3 topologies, enhancing scalability for a variety of applications. Smaller control systems can now be integrated into larger enterprise networks with a common, fully supported network infrastructure. It also includes a mobile component that enables users to create displays and interact with process data across any HTML5-compliant mobile platform.
• Enhanced control: New built-in control features—such as integrated PlantPAx model predictive control (MPC), alarm management and batch management—now operate in a common environment, helping to improve plant efficiencies and operational performance. Control-based PlantPAx MPC provides the ability to predictably manage external and complex process disturbances, and maximize process performance up to process constraints. This allows continuous improvements within the process while reducing waste and variability. The updated system also leverages the recently introduced batch application toolkit to help reduce the risk, time and cost of implementing batch control systems.

Rockwell Automation, www.rockwellautomation.com

Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this content? You should consider contributing to our CFE Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.