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Welcome to the official blog of the International Society of Automation (ISA).

This blog covers numerous topics on industrial automation such as operations & management, continuous & batch processing, connectivity, manufacturing & machine control, and Industry 4.0.

The material and information contained on this website is for general information purposes only. ISA blog posts may be authored by ISA staff and guest authors from the automation community. Views and opinions expressed by a guest author are solely their own, and do not necessarily represent those of ISA. Posts made by guest authors have been subject to peer review.

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What Your DCS Knows But Won't Tell You

This is an abstract that will be presented at ISA Automation Week 2012 in Orlando, Florida. This session is in the Control Performance Track: Manufacturing Intelligence

Presented By:

George BuckbeeMr. George Buckbee, ExperTune, Inc.

Abstract:

Your DCS is keeping secrets from you.  The distributed control system and the data historian have a huge amount of data from your plant.  But they are not telling you the most important secrets that lie within. Your control system is awash in data.  Every second more data pours in, from instruments and analyzers throughout the plant.  The data historian dutifully stores it away, so that you have Megabytes, Gigabytes, or even Terabytes of data.  It is so much data that it can be overwhelming. You could easily spend days or weeks poring through the data, looking for something significant.

The DCS and data historian are dutifully sharing it all.  And yet, it seems they are hiding the important information, somewhere in this mountain of data. Specific techniques can be used to extract the meaningful information from the control system.  Simple queries and mathematical techniques can be used to isolate equipment, process, and control problems.  These problems can have far-reaching effects, and often go un-noticed.

This paper explains how to uncover these secrets, and use the answers to improve the bottom-line operation of your plant.  Learn about specific techniques to uncover process bottlenecks, improve efficiency, save energy, and resolve quality issues.

 

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