HAL Software were delighted to present on S88 & S95 prototyping to a packed audience of industry experts in Rochestown Hotel, Cork on 16th September. We are long standing members of the international society of automation (ISA) as well as fervent advocates of its fantastic ISA-S88 and ISA-S95 standards.
The interactive Q&A session was especially interesting as there was so much experience in the room.The questions posed were invaluable in terms of fine tuning product-market fit, for the Spike S88 S95 product ; theres no point in inventing a solution to a non existing problem!
Here are a couple of queries that came up:
Control system prototyping and modelling tools tend to be very difficult to use and this is one reason why takeup is not especially high.How is Spike any different?
We made a conscious effort to simplify the approach as much as possible utilising modern best known web user interface methods. No other package comes close in terms of useability. That said, Occam’s Razor principle of ‘things should be as simple as possible but no simpler’ comes to mind. However as we are a small company and because we have wholly developed Spike internally , we can incorporate suggestions and improvements very quickly.
How and why would a control system engineering team prototype a large project with more than 1000 P&IDs?
In a large project, the hope would be that these 1000 P&IDs were perhaps based on <100 template master P&IDs or PFDs. Provided the P&IDs are copies of a master with only the tagnames changed, then only the master templates should be prototyped.
Is there any way to bulk import the physical model?
Not presently, but this is on the to-do list. It takes 10 seconds to instantiate a control module object (such as a valve), name it and locate it, in Spike. However we understand that if a busy P&ID has a 100 valves, this can become laborious. So we will accept an excel import soon.
What about MES?
There was plenty of interest in the use of Spike to model S88 process automation as a means of specifying the Batch to S95 MES interfaces and interactions. OPCUA caught the eye of the audience too as it is so powerful and, to a large extent, removes factory floor integration problems entirely. (Spike is based on OPCUA)
For more news on the instrumentation and control industry in Ireland, why not check the read-out website.
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