Invensys to close UK HQ as it lays out improvements to I/A Series

The adage that bad news is best disguised under good could have been better employed at troubled engineering conglomerate Invensys. Rumours that it is set to move its HQ from London to Boston in the US coincided with a curiously low-key announcement concerning improvements to its I/A Series plant management system, and the launch of a Fault Tolerant Ethernet (FTE) ‘meshing’ solution that’s stolen a march on the competition. The plan to move HQ is yet to go before the Invensys board but when MCS spoke to Paul Steinitz, head of corporate marketing in the US, he said it was “misleading to say that there is a complete closure of Invensys in the UK.” Support for customers within the UK would not suffer, said Steinitz. “This only changes some of the corporate offices, not the support, and the company is still listed on the London Stock Exchange.” Nevertheless, the likely closure date is within 18 months, around the time current disposals are completed, reducing the company to half its size. In fact, the move makes corporate sense, as more than half of the company’s sales are in North America. However, it is rumoured that current CEO Rick Haythornthwaite might not want to move to the US and may walk away once the move is completed. Power will probably pass to Production Management division boss Leo Quinn, himself British but now based in the US. Steinitiz acknowledged that the “geographic centre of the company was more in the US than it ever was”. But he was, understandably, more interested in expounding the benefits of Foxboro’s ‘self-healing’ FTE which, he believed, were consistent with the company's aim to be “focussed on the process control market” rather than on the ERP/MES level. That was a battle that boss Leo Quinn has admitted Invensys lost a while ago, and hence in part the sale of Baan to SSA Global. Running at up to 1Gb, the FTE solution is a ‘mesh’ control network, consisting of connected smart switches, ports and fibre-optic cabling, providing multiple communications paths between network stations. The switches “lighten the overall data flow on the highway, allowing only the data that needs to get through from one point to another to pass.” There are more fault-tolerant paths than with a traditional bus network. “Data will automatically re-route in the event that lines goes down. The mesh tolerates multiple faults by managing alternate paths between devices.” The FTE can be used at the process control and field network levels in new I/A systems and to extend existing installations. Is it new? While the network and switches are off-the-shelf, Steinitz says, “the tricky part for plant-wide automation is getting our devices, the control processors and work stations to talk to this redundant network in a way that our control processors know when there is a failure in the mesh and know how to hook up.” This takes special software within the device, patented by Foxboro to allow the control processor to talk to the mesh. While other vendors offer a mesh network, communicating into the mesh “is the breakthrough.” Workstations, control processors, device integrators and fieldbus digital plant network modules can all be placed on the common network. Steinitz claims the other differentiator is sheer speed. “The mesh boasts a switchover time of microseconds if there is a failure in a wire or switch.” The topology used is called ‘rapid spanning tree’, which Steinitz claims no one else “has been able to tap into correctly.” On other systems switchover is typically 1-30 seconds. “Others have not been able to do what we have done – we’re changing something that hasn’t really changed in the last 10 years,” he claims. Other key benefits include lower cost thanks to use of COTS off-the-shelf switch technology and components and longer distances (up to 2km) between each switch. What about others’ systems? The Foxboro solution is the network and the software to drive the devices. “Theoretically the device connecting into this does not have to be an Invensys device – as of today all device that hook into this directly are Invensys devices. If you want to bring in something like Modbus – it would come in through the Invensys device in order to get on to the mesh.” As for the I/A series system, improvements include better data throughput, better controllers able to communicate with other devices and so on. Said Steinitz: “What we’re finding are new demands being put on control networks within a plant. They are requiring higher throughput because there is much more information flowing in a plant-wide network – for example information coming from fieldbus. “It is not just one transmitter signal: it is all its diagnostics and history and there are a lot more historical records being kept. So there is lot more data flowing on the highway so that highway has to get faster and fault-tolerant.