Intelligent transmitters for process control — What, how, when, how much? A user's point of view

Abstract

With the emergence of Distributed Control System (DCS) and the spreading of digital communication, intelligent transmitters appeared about a decade ago on the market of process control. They account now roughly for 20% of the transmitters manufactured by the world major suppliers. Lots of proprietary and pre-normative communication architectures are now proposed, leading to a growingly confusing situation, and especially on the fieldbus issue. Most of the major suppliers are struggling to promote their own proprietary solutions ranging from the digital field devices to the software supervision tools. In that context, how can end-users derive profit today from the better services provided by the new functionalities and the digital communication without being locked to only one supplier? For Electricité de France (EDF), the world's largest operator of nuclear power plants, different classes of solutions can be envisaged according to various criteria of performances, architectures, services for control and maintenance purposes. If proprietary architectures are suited for short-lived on-site testing systems, long-term availability of industrial products for control-command of power plants requires solutions based on standardized communications, which have yet to be finalized and accepted by industrial users and vendors.