Episode 03: How Platinum Uses IEC 61499 and UniversalAutomation.org for Sustainable Carbon Capture | UAO Goes Live: The Future of Automation

Description

In this episode of UAO Goes Live, discover how Platinum Electrical Engineering uses IEC 61499 and UniversalAutomation.org to deliver a modular, scalable automation system for carbon capture in Morocco. This innovative project integrates open automation, edge computing, and cloud analytics to enable autonomous algae growth that locks carbon for over 1,000 years. Learn how portability, interoperability, and hardware independence accelerate sustainability initiatives and future-proof industrial automation.

About UniversalAutomation.org (UAO)

UniversalAutomation.org (UAO) is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to transforming industrial automation through open standards and shared source technology. The association manages the reference implementation of a shared runtime execution engine based on the IEC 61499 standard, enabling true interoperability between hardware from multiple vendors and portability of automation software applications.

By providing a ready-to-use, vendor-neutral runtime environment, UniversalAutomation.org empowers companies to build flexible Industry 4.0 architectures, accelerate digital transformation, and maximize return on investment (ROI) through software reusability and hardware independence.

The development of this runtime is governed by shared source principles, ensuring long-term compatibility and collaborative innovation. Members—including end users, OEMs, system integrators, and technology vendors—work collectively to create a global ecosystem for plug-and-produce automation solutions.

UniversalAutomation.org is growing rapidly as more organizations adopt open automation to overcome vendor lock-in, enable IT/OT convergence, and support greenfield and brownfield projects. Academic institutions are also leveraging this technology to train the next generation of automation engineers.

Companies and institutions that want to lead the future of industrial automation, develop next-generation control systems, and participate in a global open automation community are invited to join UniversalAutomation.org.

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Transcription

Speaker #1
Hi everybody and good day to you. My name is Greg Boucou and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Universal Automation at Hort. Today it's the third edition of our UAO Goes Live and we have the pleasure to be with Stephen Malby from the company Platinum. During this third session we'll learn more about the typical use case of using the UAO technology in a real use case and a real life application. So just as a... reminder, it's our third edition, so the two-thirds editions are viewable on either YouTube or LinkedIn. So have a look if you want to remind yourself about, for example, what is Universal Automation Network, which was the first episode, and the second was about use cases with the company called Emirin. So today, welcome on the stage, Stephen Malby, Martin, Director of Patreon. Hi, Steven.
Speaker #7
Hi, Greg. Thank you for allowing us to do this today.
Speaker #1
Yeah, pleasure to welcome you on stage with us. You want to show us one of your projects, so I leave you the floor, you can share your screen and we can go on.
Speaker #7
Okay, thank you. Just to check, can everyone see that?
Speaker #1
Yes, we can see it.
Speaker #7
Perfect. So welcome everyone, good day. I'll just tell you a little bit about the company itself first. So we're Platinum Electrical Engineering. We're a system integrations company based in just outside of Newcastle, northeast coast, United Kingdom. We have a reputation for being quite an innovative company. As you'll see from the project that I'm about to demonstrate, you know, we get involved in some quite advanced sort of technologies and things where new companies are coming to the market. They're trying to bring new products to the market, they're trying to bring new systems to the market and new processes to the market, so we get a lot involved with a lot of those staler companies. This particular company that I'm going to talk about now is a startup. The project is based out in the western provinces of Morocco, just on the outskirts of the Sahara Desert. So I guess if we have to talk about the segment that the project sits within, it's a water waste water and the end product is actually carbon capture technology. It's autonomous operations for local algae strains which are grown in controlled environments and then the algae is then treated sort of post-production and buried and the carbon that the algae's captured during the cycle is locked in for over a thousand years. So the beauty about this is that you know the company of huge mines of scientific research and bodies of work you know to get to this point it's it's has a really it's a really ambitious company it's relies on a huge amount of data to make very sort of conscious decisions about you know where in the growth cycle that the algae happens to be what should happen next you know how how will they protect the algae from from sort of external sources and things like that So this project has a lot of sensors that wouldn't typically be used within a standard industrial setting, you know, more of a lab-based style sensor or an oceanographic sensor in this instance. So the solution that we came up with for this particular project was a modularized architecture. So therefore, you know, the methodologies of 61499 language allowed us to create things and cut paste style to scale up where the company wanted to be. It has a direct synchronization to the enterprise layer of the IT systems with a secondary remote connection which sits in the company's headquarters just outside of London in the UK. The benefits I guess of doing it in this way is you know we could use 61499 to create the CATS which allowed the rapid scale up for future models of the site. Because they contain all of the information, they contain all the HMI code, they contain all of the synchronization with the enterprise system all within an asset-centric format. The code can then be redistributed around as many devices as you like. So, you know, from a decentralized point of view. As the scale-up continues, code can be moved around and load not necessarily sitting on one particular processor, it can be shifted between the devices. And also, as a prerequisite of this, a lot of the information which is gained out of lab-based experiments needs to be implemented in the actual real world. So the customer has to have the flexibility to be able to change parameters kind of on the fly or for a new batch. whatever that looks like. So some of the key elements of the requirements that we require for this system were algae growth is obviously, you know, it's a living organism. So it, you know, to get the best possible outcome, it requires a repeatable, reliable and accurate process. And that comes from, you know, all parts of the cycle from the initial growth cycle to, you know, when it's when it's moved between the ponds, as you see in the in the image there. It needs to be largely autonomous, so again you know you can see that the scale and the ambition of the site, it covers a lot of space, you know the coastal desert land that this site sits on is a strip of land about four kilometers by about 20 kilometers long I believe, so you know it has the potential to fill that site someday and it's very difficult to get people to go and look around that site. make checks, tests, whatever that requires. So the system kind of needs to bring in a lot of this data and a lot of this information and be able to self-control. Again, you know, modularity is key. The unique part of the growth cycle, I guess, has to be, you know, a certain fit, form and function from the elements of the ponds for the sizes, the dimensions, you know, the speed of the growth and all of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be repeatable over and over again on multiple different assets. The company have also identified multiple global sites. These each have a unique set of challenges, be that weather systems, be that localities and things like that. So there's a lot of consideration and there's a lot of work and effort goes into building one of these sites. It's very complicated. And obviously speed of scale. It's very important from a sustainability point of view. The algae is capturing carbon from the atmosphere. which is then being locked in. You know, every country in the world now, you know, has to hit climate targets. You know, everyone's aware of what's going on with the, you know, some of the environmental challenges that we're facing. So, you know, it's very important that companies like this can proceed at pace and start to capture some of that calm. So looking at the project itself from a hardware... and system topology. This is basically how it's set up. So in the top left hand side there, we have the Galaxy for the SCADA analytics and beyond SCADA for the enterprise level that runs on a historian. That also runs part of the software, which is a VivaSystem platform. And we have a client PC that sits next to that which is on site which runs the operations management interface. So that particular client PC will be sitting within the lab that's on site. So you know changes can be made, data can be monitored and everything that's going on at the particular site. Then we have a secondary remote client which is in the HQ in London. which is basically mimicking the on-site system obviously different user levels and restrictions and things like that are in place but that'll sit within within the lab environment in in london then uh also on site we have another pc which is an industrial pc which runs a thin client and that does some of the controls for the on-site operations so that's in a particular building on site and changes and data can be monitored from from that point as well in the actual operations side of things. There's also, if we go to the bottom there now, there's also an Edge PC, which sits there with part of the SCADA client for the on-site and does a little bit of data acquisition as well. Then from the control layer or the typical OT layer, as we know it, on-site we have the IO distributed in a local CPU. four separate places in this particular three separate places sorry in this particular instance so we we have uh key parts of the site so the load is spaced around the three processes as you see there there's also locally for hmis so they are traditional hmis in the sense of that they do start stop functions local controls local visualization close to the elements that they are actually controlling and then as well we have 16 variable speed drives which are doing various pumping operations transfers around the site. They will host some of the code they are all connected at 61499 as well and then at the top layer sort of outside of the SCADA system we have a cloud historian which is has a direct connection to the Aviva system platform as well as we publish some data via MQTT to that. that historian and then we reuse that data within a view system platform as well so as a simplified architecture to that you know as you can see starting down in the in the bottom right hand side we have the you know the the rs232 or the lab based devices you know the oceanographic sensors and that kind of thing which we we use some gateways to do protocol conversions so we can communicate to the uh to the plc's from there we have the traditional field devices as you would expect in any project you know pumps valves level sensors that kind of thing then we have the three distributed pc plc's and the hmis then we move up into you know the the apps and analytics layer and you can see you know we have the components of a viewer system platform there that the galaxy that runs on the server with various different drivers to publish wherever it happens to be and obviously to the to the far right um we have the the on-site uh thin client which is doing some of the controls some of the scada stuff there as well and then if we move to the bottom left hand side there's some some light waveform sensors which basically communicate over MQTT so we publish that over an MQTT broker and we push that into a package called Aviva Insight which is an online historian and then we use that from Aviva Insight into system platforms so we can extrapolate that data at the same time we have had some recognition for this a particular project last year and to the end of 2023 we won the robotics and automation award for innovation and sustainability and we were also awarded the schneider electric innovation award for for this particular project so i'm also moving into you know some real world answers and questions and things for when we look at 61499 you know some of the things that we've realized that that we, you know, we. We learned as we went with some challenges that we faced and some of the best practices that we we adopted. So one of the things was was firmware you know some of the products that can run 61499 can also be standard products you know typically the PCs are just standard PCs so you know there is some firmware changes and things that need to be made you know that these things have to be matched around the product so you know has to be some time for that and also to keep checking for film ever. updates. You know, this is a relatively new technology, but, you know, companies who are providing the hardware, you know, constantly updating the firmwares and constantly making changes and things like this. So, you know, it's important to keep looking for the firmware updates to make sure that you've got the latest and the best as part of the project. Then revision releases, we used the Schneider Electric Tool EcoStruxure Automation Expert. So it's constantly evolving, You know, they're adding new features. you know on a quarterly half yearly basis so you know throughout the project we we had to keep looking for constant revision releases and see how that would benefit the the customer you know to the to the end user and what changes we had to make to to suit those requirements. Some of the challenges that we faced you know it's about the awareness of 61499 you know everyone I believe is familiar with the traditional PLC as we know it you know it's been around for for a long long time you know various iterations of the plc but never really a huge innovation in that sense whereas 61499 is you know it's not something to be to be feared it's it's you know it's doing the same job as a plc it's just doing it in a very slightly different way and it's more about you know engaging with uh the people who who you know have some some questions and things about ISC 61499 to make sure that they're answered and you know that it's clear to them what the differences are and you know what they'll need to do within their organization to to be able to maintain the the code etc uh component configuration uh there was there was a lot more time for us in this project doing component configuration as it would be normally so that was something that you know we we weren't aware of when we started the project it was just something that we we learned as we went you know it took a considerable amount of time for that part of it. I think that will change as time moves on. You know, we have that knowledge now, so it's becoming easier for us as we go. And as far as the best practices go, you know, we kept really stringent records on this of what we did, what we changed, you know, why we changed it and the reasons for it because, you know, internally as a company ourselves, we have to train and educate our own people. So it's important that we gather this information. you know we make decisions about why we've changed things you know records of decision and why things were done in a certain way so that other people within the company can also learn from that and that goes on to the standard operating procedures as well the standard operating procedures obviously are important because you know you don't want to have to get everyone to learn the same thing over and over and over again whereas if you've got a standard operating procedure in place it simplifies it for the next you know the next engineers who are going to be working on similar projects or all the same project. and they can see that what's already been done, and then that saves a lot of time for those guys. So the benefits as we see it, you know, from using the technology, it was very simple to handle client changes and modifications because usually, you know, in the traditional sense, we would do a hardware selection first. We would make sure there was enough IO. We would, you know, there's all of these considerations around the hardware that we didn't really have to concern ourselves with because we knew we could place the code where we wanted to place it we knew that we could uh make make changes you know to the code without affecting the hardware in the hardware selection in in that sense and then we could just add the additional hardware whatever that happened to be you know with this you know there's a lot of there's a lot of uh options out there you know there's more manufacturers come to the market with 61499 uh compliant technologies We saw vast improvement in the interface of the SCADA system and by that I mean specifically a VivaSystem platform. The Schneider Electric EcoStruxural Automation Expert offer has a direct synchronisation to a VivaSystem platform and that saved a lot of time and it did reduce our time in testing, our time in being able to understand. to make sure that everything was present in that SCADA layer or in the enterprise layer as as you see it you know that and that we estimate that that reduced our time by about 25 to 30 because of the the the style of the single integrated development environment that EA provides it also makes it a lot easier to collaborate efforts so you can across teams in our sense because usually you would have you know someone who was working on the HMI, someone who was working on system platform, someone who was working on the PLC code and all of those people have to come together you know with their individual parts and have to have their individual parts ready and able to test it and all of this kind of thing but in a single development environment you the the ability to be able to pull those things together quickly and test them does save a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of mistakes and things can be tested as you go a lot more effectively and efficiently you know you're kind of optimizing your own processes during the during the development period and then you know one of the biggest ones i guess which is i'm sure most people are aware of is you know it's it's future-proofing for the for the client you know we consider about the the multiple different global sites that the client is is looking towards and They obviously, some of these places are in remote environments. They're in countries that the supply chain may not be as robust as others. But whereas with the 61499, anyone who's offering a compliant product to that technology, we can easily make sure that that's available in that country and can be used. And obviously, we aren't dependent on a single vendor. collective group of a couple of vendors you know we've got much more flexibility in that approach and then that obviously you know the improved supply chain moving forward for spare parts you know breakdowns anything like that you know is is relatively straightforward and it certainly reduces the burden of of having to carry a lot more uh spare parts for the for the company as well so that that's about it from me um i'll pass that back to greg and i'll open the floor for any questions.
Speaker #1
Yes. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. And let's go to the chat and let's check some questions. I see one from Suat. Maybe we can read it together. What factors did you consider before deciding to start a project in UAO? And what does a company's journey look like from concept to commissioning? How about that?
Speaker #7
That's a good, great question. Two great questions, I should say. Yeah. So I think the factors before deciding to start the project were, for this particular one, it was really clear. The customer had a very specific set of goals. You know, they wanted to scale up really fast. It was clearly a modularized system from the outset. And I think that was the most important part of this. And plus, the level of data exchange and things that they needed to handle needed to be done in a simplistic way. So when I guess from looking at any project in this way, when you've got a data heavy project and something that you know that there's going to be a lot of hardware there eventually, you know, it's going to be in different places or, you know, there's going to be a lot of technological advances as they move forward as a company as well. I think, you know, 61499 lends itself to all of these things. It gives them something for the future. you know and i heard a great quote a few weeks ago where someone talked about a traditional plc and said you know traditional plc's were designed for electrical technicians you know it was an iteration of relay logic and the relay logic was uh something that they were already familiar with and it was something that they were all you know they were already competent at doing and you know creating that code was an extension of relay logic you know like putting it down on a piece of paper and deploying it as code. Whereas now, you know, We aren't so reliant on that. We're a lot more reliant on data, you know, the rise of AI and things like this, which can now start to be embedded. You know, we've talked about edge control in PLC projects for the last 10 years. You know, it's been available. But this accelerates that journey. It makes it more simplistic. You know, you can even run your code on a PC, Raspberry Pi. You know, Greg's got all the demos for all that kind of stuff. You can do that. And I think, you know, looking at the... the journey to take from concept to commissioning that is I think the the important part if we talk about the concept first is is listening and understanding the the needs of the customer and I think then you can formulate a strategy to move forward with them and I think there's a lot of considerations in the in the sense of people need to be trained you know they have they have new staff they need to be trained people need to be uh raise the awareness you know that's that's a big thing raise the awareness to the to the client to make sure that they you know they understand everything about it because the more information you can give to them in the outset you know the more benefits that they're going to see from the from the project and then you know working through the project i guess like any other project communication is is key um you know we during this project we had really good communication with the teams at aviva we had the really good communication with the teams at shiny electric we've got good support on the hardware you know that was that was paramount To us, you know, this is, like I said, it's with any new technology, you'll put the support mechanisms there. The guys at Universal Automation have the training and everything online that, you know, you can point people towards that kind of stuff. You know, and then in the commissioning sense, you know, it saves time by being able to test a lot of these things. It's a lot easier to test, I would certainly say, that than it is in a traditional sort of PLC setting because, you know, you can, you know, with it being on a... PC, you can emulate a lot of the things that you want to do as well, which is not necessarily that it is the case with 6.11.31 or traditional PLCs, but this is much more so specifically with the integration into the IT layer and the enterprise systems that it communicates with.
Speaker #1
Yeah, because I think this what you just said leads to the next question we just arrived. which is about how did programmers find it moving from 6.11.41 to 6.14.99? What's the journey and what did they see and encounter?
Speaker #7
Another good question. Thanks, Morgan. So yeah, I think it was more the way that we approached it as a company rather than the engineers being pushed from one place to another. And I've always said the same thing, you know, even talking about 6-11-31, when someone says, you know, I don't know how to program Siemens or I don't know how to program Rockwell or I don't know how to program this. You know, what they're actually saying to you is they're not familiar with that development environment. They're not saying that they don't know how to program it because they do. They're just not familiar with the environment that they need to use. And this is just another case of that. It's a different development environment. I think the more that, you know, you... you allow them to sort of learn for themselves, give them the time to spend to learn for themselves, keep them instructed on changes that are coming, you know, things that you see that are in the pipeline, you know, with some of the developments and things, you know, specifically with the UAO groups, you know, we talk about it a lot. And that was mainly the biggest challenge. And I think that, you know, when it boils down to it, you know, even when you get right down into the weeds of... a 61499 environment. It's structured text. It's something that a lot of people who program are familiar with. It's just the way that it's set up and the way that it's brought to the forefront that's different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's really true. And taking this question further, and I think you mentioned it a bit in your presentation. For me, one question still stays on the portability of the application. So it means that today you have done your project with a lot of products and mainly this time with product from Schneider Electric. Do you have an idea or could you please explain how much time it would take, for example, if you would have to change those products and take product from another supplier, for example, on your project? What does it cost and what's the difference between 6.99, what you do now, and... if you would have to do it in 6-11-31?
Speaker #7
Yeah, so we, I mean, if we had to go back and do this in 6-11-31 and change out.
Speaker #0
segments of parts there's a there's a lot of considerations to be had in there you know communications are one thing you know um network and everything else that you know a traditional plc the network adapters and all of this kind of thing that go with it um you know more process and power etc etc where we tested a lot of this at the start you know we did we did some some work internally on this and you know we we installed the environment on a standard laptop plc And we tested to see how quick we could change that between a PLC and a PC to do it. And it's really simple. You know, that's the beauty about it. You don't have to have, you know, you're not waiting in a supply chain to have it. You know, worst case scenario, I mean, I doubt that we would ever have to do this, but worst case scenario, if something did fail, you know, we can go and buy a laptop at the local electronics store and do something with that if we had to. You know, whereas we couldn't do that with a PC. plc at all so i think that's that's a a really good point and i think it's it's something that makes this technology a lot more simplistic yeah that gives us a good uh good idea what's what's different is between both both technologies i'm
Speaker #1
going uh through the question that's great we have many questions today so the next one from from dave you mentioned that component configuration added time to the project development Can you expand on that? What components require more time and why?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so some of the items that, you know, they come out of the box because they are, you know, some of the hardware was compliant with, you know, drives as an example, various few drives, just, you know, they're compliant with 6.11.31. So the firmware has to be changed. It's mainly to do with the configuration and the firmware changes that you have to do with standardized components more so than anything else and that's that's the reason for the for the additional time and obviously there was some uh changes to these firmwares you know that we had to keep abreast of and we we had to go back a couple of times and make those changes as the firmwares were released yeah
Speaker #1
okay that's good so i think last question for today from kevin during fat um phase of your testing, what percentage of time would you estimate was saved in comparison to the traditional PLC system? We speak about 30, 40 percent, etc.
Speaker #0
Yeah, again, it's a hard one to say for the factory acceptance testing at that portion of it, because how we did this was slightly different in the sense of, you know, a full factory acceptance test that would be, you know, it was in a different country, you know, we also were the EPC for all the control panels as well, so we had all of them at our site. We started with a test rig, so we built a test rig and then obviously with the single development environment as I mentioned earlier, a lot of time saved in that when you want to test the synchronization, you know, in our case to a VivaSystem platform. and insight as we used to there, we could have all of that done. You know, we had all the HMIs and everything within the actual CAT itself. So that did save a lot of time from that. It was a lot simpler than it would have been had you have to bring everyone together. So if you had to bring, you know, the guy who was doing the system platform, the guy who was doing the HMIs, the guy who was doing the PLC, and you have to bring all of them together as a collective team and do all that preparation work, make sure everyone's finished. their particular stage gate of that test and bring them together and do that. This was a lot more simplistic. So as a percentage, I would say that it's at least 30%. I couldn't tell you the exact figure, but I would say it was pretty close to that.
Speaker #1
Good. So I said it was the last question, but in fact, there was one in between which came in. So let's see if we can squeeze it in from Marc. Getting the whole new ecosystem, were there significant cost savings regarding hardware, software, infrastructure, install and commissioning? And is it a key selling point or are these benefits more engineering based?
Speaker #0
Another very good question. Yeah, cost saving wise, I would say yes, definitely. Because when you talk about, you know, you're talking about a reduction in the engineering time for the software development, so that's clear. But when you talk about hardware, because you have the flexibility to choose, there's some great offers you know if you wanted to go to a and do you know use a pc as opposed to a plc but you know especially the smaller machines and things like that that you know are really cost sensitive if you wanted to do that you've got the ability to have the edge analytics you've got the ability to have the runtime environment and everything just on a on a PC, whereas you may have needed an expensive... PLC, you know, comms cards, all of this kind of thing, you know, and then you're just using a remote I.O. adapter. You're connecting to your physical I.O. from the PC. You know, it's all it's all done from there. You're connecting to your HMI or your IPC if you want to have an IPC doing something else externally to that. It's a lot more about the agility of this as well. You know, it allows you to be a lot more creative in the way that you approach projects. So, you know, you can definitely save money. And I think that the benefits are twofold because, you know, we all know that we saw a huge disruption in supply chain over the last three to four years. You know, this technology eliminates, not all of it, but it eliminates a large portion of that. You know, and obviously without the vendor login, you've got so much more choice of who you use. you know why you use them the reasons that you use them and i think that's the the key selling point more than more than anything else mark good great great and um just uh i see another question from the chat coming in uh which
Speaker #1
is linked to platinum itself and the question is about if you offer consultation services for validation of uo projects yes yes we do so yeah um
Speaker #0
I mean, anything to do with 61499, you know, that's something that we're certainly interested in. You know, as a company, we now will only push forward with 61499 projects. We're that confident in the technology. You know, we believe in it. There's so many benefits and multifacets to this. You know, even looking at the sustainability piece, the reusability of code, you know, the time constraints, the ability of what you can do. with the code, the systems that you can link it into, you know, it's so much more versatile. And, you know, the creativity, I guess, from the start with looking at a project for 61499 is key, you know, and it's also key to the methods and the methodologies that people use within their own company to gain traction with a project as well, because, you know, we're fully aware that you do hit. the well-poisoner within the company, you know, the naysayer, the people who say this will never work, it's not this, it's not that well, it does, and you know, it's more about reassurance in that instance.
Speaker #1
I think that gives us a good idea of how the technology can be used and how you position yourself as well as the company, Platinum, I mean, as a member of Universal Automation Notorious. And I think that's the end of our... Q&A session. So I thank you all for being there, for seeing that. You see the contact details of Stephen, which are down on the screen. Stephen, I really thank you for sharing with us your experience with the Tx499, with the technology of universalautomation.org, and I hope that it will help the community to understand more what universalautomation.org is as a non-profit associations. I take the opportunity to say that we are a non-profit association we are acting globally and we are open for for new new joiners so new joiner our organization uh you could be user of automation you could be vendor information you could be working more in the academics or being an institute link to automation we welcome all of you so don't hesitate to to get back to us contact us on our linkedin page and uh we'll get back to you to uh for maybe a small meeting or uh or directly to to have you subscribing to the associations so thank you all again and i wish you a very nice end of the day bye thanks bye

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About UAO Goes Live: The Future of Automation

Tune in and discover how UniversalAutomation.org and its ecosystem are transforming industries, one open standard at a time.

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Description

About UniversalAutomation.org (UAO)

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Transcription

Speaker #1
Hi everybody and good day to you. My name is Greg Boucou and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Universal Automation at Hort. Today it's the third edition of our UAO Goes Live and we have the pleasure to be with Stephen Malby from the company Platinum. During this third session we'll learn more about the typical use case of using the UAO technology in a real use case and a real life application. So just as a... reminder, it's our third edition, so the two-thirds editions are viewable on either YouTube or LinkedIn. So have a look if you want to remind yourself about, for example, what is Universal Automation Network, which was the first episode, and the second was about use cases with the company called Emirin. So today, welcome on the stage, Stephen Malby, Martin, Director of Patreon. Hi, Steven.
Speaker #7
Hi, Greg. Thank you for allowing us to do this today.
Speaker #1
Yeah, pleasure to welcome you on stage with us. You want to show us one of your projects, so I leave you the floor, you can share your screen and we can go on.
Speaker #7
Okay, thank you. Just to check, can everyone see that?
Speaker #1
Yes, we can see it.
Speaker #7
Perfect. So welcome everyone, good day. I'll just tell you a little bit about the company itself first. So we're Platinum Electrical Engineering. We're a system integrations company based in just outside of Newcastle, northeast coast, United Kingdom. We have a reputation for being quite an innovative company. As you'll see from the project that I'm about to demonstrate, you know, we get involved in some quite advanced sort of technologies and things where new companies are coming to the market. They're trying to bring new products to the market, they're trying to bring new systems to the market and new processes to the market, so we get a lot involved with a lot of those staler companies. This particular company that I'm going to talk about now is a startup. The project is based out in the western provinces of Morocco, just on the outskirts of the Sahara Desert. So I guess if we have to talk about the segment that the project sits within, it's a water waste water and the end product is actually carbon capture technology. It's autonomous operations for local algae strains which are grown in controlled environments and then the algae is then treated sort of post-production and buried and the carbon that the algae's captured during the cycle is locked in for over a thousand years. So the beauty about this is that you know the company of huge mines of scientific research and bodies of work you know to get to this point it's it's has a really it's a really ambitious company it's relies on a huge amount of data to make very sort of conscious decisions about you know where in the growth cycle that the algae happens to be what should happen next you know how how will they protect the algae from from sort of external sources and things like that So this project has a lot of sensors that wouldn't typically be used within a standard industrial setting, you know, more of a lab-based style sensor or an oceanographic sensor in this instance. So the solution that we came up with for this particular project was a modularized architecture. So therefore, you know, the methodologies of 61499 language allowed us to create things and cut paste style to scale up where the company wanted to be. It has a direct synchronization to the enterprise layer of the IT systems with a secondary remote connection which sits in the company's headquarters just outside of London in the UK. The benefits I guess of doing it in this way is you know we could use 61499 to create the CATS which allowed the rapid scale up for future models of the site. Because they contain all of the information, they contain all the HMI code, they contain all of the synchronization with the enterprise system all within an asset-centric format. The code can then be redistributed around as many devices as you like. So, you know, from a decentralized point of view. As the scale-up continues, code can be moved around and load not necessarily sitting on one particular processor, it can be shifted between the devices. And also, as a prerequisite of this, a lot of the information which is gained out of lab-based experiments needs to be implemented in the actual real world. So the customer has to have the flexibility to be able to change parameters kind of on the fly or for a new batch. whatever that looks like. So some of the key elements of the requirements that we require for this system were algae growth is obviously, you know, it's a living organism. So it, you know, to get the best possible outcome, it requires a repeatable, reliable and accurate process. And that comes from, you know, all parts of the cycle from the initial growth cycle to, you know, when it's when it's moved between the ponds, as you see in the in the image there. It needs to be largely autonomous, so again you know you can see that the scale and the ambition of the site, it covers a lot of space, you know the coastal desert land that this site sits on is a strip of land about four kilometers by about 20 kilometers long I believe, so you know it has the potential to fill that site someday and it's very difficult to get people to go and look around that site. make checks, tests, whatever that requires. So the system kind of needs to bring in a lot of this data and a lot of this information and be able to self-control. Again, you know, modularity is key. The unique part of the growth cycle, I guess, has to be, you know, a certain fit, form and function from the elements of the ponds for the sizes, the dimensions, you know, the speed of the growth and all of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be repeatable over and over again on multiple different assets. The company have also identified multiple global sites. These each have a unique set of challenges, be that weather systems, be that localities and things like that. So there's a lot of consideration and there's a lot of work and effort goes into building one of these sites. It's very complicated. And obviously speed of scale. It's very important from a sustainability point of view. The algae is capturing carbon from the atmosphere. which is then being locked in. You know, every country in the world now, you know, has to hit climate targets. You know, everyone's aware of what's going on with the, you know, some of the environmental challenges that we're facing. So, you know, it's very important that companies like this can proceed at pace and start to capture some of that calm. So looking at the project itself from a hardware... and system topology. This is basically how it's set up. So in the top left hand side there, we have the Galaxy for the SCADA analytics and beyond SCADA for the enterprise level that runs on a historian. That also runs part of the software, which is a VivaSystem platform. And we have a client PC that sits next to that which is on site which runs the operations management interface. So that particular client PC will be sitting within the lab that's on site. So you know changes can be made, data can be monitored and everything that's going on at the particular site. Then we have a secondary remote client which is in the HQ in London. which is basically mimicking the on-site system obviously different user levels and restrictions and things like that are in place but that'll sit within within the lab environment in in london then uh also on site we have another pc which is an industrial pc which runs a thin client and that does some of the controls for the on-site operations so that's in a particular building on site and changes and data can be monitored from from that point as well in the actual operations side of things. There's also, if we go to the bottom there now, there's also an Edge PC, which sits there with part of the SCADA client for the on-site and does a little bit of data acquisition as well. Then from the control layer or the typical OT layer, as we know it, on-site we have the IO distributed in a local CPU. four separate places in this particular three separate places sorry in this particular instance so we we have uh key parts of the site so the load is spaced around the three processes as you see there there's also locally for hmis so they are traditional hmis in the sense of that they do start stop functions local controls local visualization close to the elements that they are actually controlling and then as well we have 16 variable speed drives which are doing various pumping operations transfers around the site. They will host some of the code they are all connected at 61499 as well and then at the top layer sort of outside of the SCADA system we have a cloud historian which is has a direct connection to the Aviva system platform as well as we publish some data via MQTT to that. that historian and then we reuse that data within a view system platform as well so as a simplified architecture to that you know as you can see starting down in the in the bottom right hand side we have the you know the the rs232 or the lab based devices you know the oceanographic sensors and that kind of thing which we we use some gateways to do protocol conversions so we can communicate to the uh to the plc's from there we have the traditional field devices as you would expect in any project you know pumps valves level sensors that kind of thing then we have the three distributed pc plc's and the hmis then we move up into you know the the apps and analytics layer and you can see you know we have the components of a viewer system platform there that the galaxy that runs on the server with various different drivers to publish wherever it happens to be and obviously to the to the far right um we have the the on-site uh thin client which is doing some of the controls some of the scada stuff there as well and then if we move to the bottom left hand side there's some some light waveform sensors which basically communicate over MQTT so we publish that over an MQTT broker and we push that into a package called Aviva Insight which is an online historian and then we use that from Aviva Insight into system platforms so we can extrapolate that data at the same time we have had some recognition for this a particular project last year and to the end of 2023 we won the robotics and automation award for innovation and sustainability and we were also awarded the schneider electric innovation award for for this particular project so i'm also moving into you know some real world answers and questions and things for when we look at 61499 you know some of the things that we've realized that that we, you know, we. We learned as we went with some challenges that we faced and some of the best practices that we we adopted. So one of the things was was firmware you know some of the products that can run 61499 can also be standard products you know typically the PCs are just standard PCs so you know there is some firmware changes and things that need to be made you know that these things have to be matched around the product so you know has to be some time for that and also to keep checking for film ever. updates. You know, this is a relatively new technology, but, you know, companies who are providing the hardware, you know, constantly updating the firmwares and constantly making changes and things like this. So, you know, it's important to keep looking for the firmware updates to make sure that you've got the latest and the best as part of the project. Then revision releases, we used the Schneider Electric Tool EcoStruxure Automation Expert. So it's constantly evolving, You know, they're adding new features. you know on a quarterly half yearly basis so you know throughout the project we we had to keep looking for constant revision releases and see how that would benefit the the customer you know to the to the end user and what changes we had to make to to suit those requirements. Some of the challenges that we faced you know it's about the awareness of 61499 you know everyone I believe is familiar with the traditional PLC as we know it you know it's been around for for a long long time you know various iterations of the plc but never really a huge innovation in that sense whereas 61499 is you know it's not something to be to be feared it's it's you know it's doing the same job as a plc it's just doing it in a very slightly different way and it's more about you know engaging with uh the people who who you know have some some questions and things about ISC 61499 to make sure that they're answered and you know that it's clear to them what the differences are and you know what they'll need to do within their organization to to be able to maintain the the code etc uh component configuration uh there was there was a lot more time for us in this project doing component configuration as it would be normally so that was something that you know we we weren't aware of when we started the project it was just something that we we learned as we went you know it took a considerable amount of time for that part of it. I think that will change as time moves on. You know, we have that knowledge now, so it's becoming easier for us as we go. And as far as the best practices go, you know, we kept really stringent records on this of what we did, what we changed, you know, why we changed it and the reasons for it because, you know, internally as a company ourselves, we have to train and educate our own people. So it's important that we gather this information. you know we make decisions about why we've changed things you know records of decision and why things were done in a certain way so that other people within the company can also learn from that and that goes on to the standard operating procedures as well the standard operating procedures obviously are important because you know you don't want to have to get everyone to learn the same thing over and over and over again whereas if you've got a standard operating procedure in place it simplifies it for the next you know the next engineers who are going to be working on similar projects or all the same project. and they can see that what's already been done, and then that saves a lot of time for those guys. So the benefits as we see it, you know, from using the technology, it was very simple to handle client changes and modifications because usually, you know, in the traditional sense, we would do a hardware selection first. We would make sure there was enough IO. We would, you know, there's all of these considerations around the hardware that we didn't really have to concern ourselves with because we knew we could place the code where we wanted to place it we knew that we could uh make make changes you know to the code without affecting the hardware in the hardware selection in in that sense and then we could just add the additional hardware whatever that happened to be you know with this you know there's a lot of there's a lot of uh options out there you know there's more manufacturers come to the market with 61499 uh compliant technologies We saw vast improvement in the interface of the SCADA system and by that I mean specifically a VivaSystem platform. The Schneider Electric EcoStruxural Automation Expert offer has a direct synchronisation to a VivaSystem platform and that saved a lot of time and it did reduce our time in testing, our time in being able to understand. to make sure that everything was present in that SCADA layer or in the enterprise layer as as you see it you know that and that we estimate that that reduced our time by about 25 to 30 because of the the the style of the single integrated development environment that EA provides it also makes it a lot easier to collaborate efforts so you can across teams in our sense because usually you would have you know someone who was working on the HMI, someone who was working on system platform, someone who was working on the PLC code and all of those people have to come together you know with their individual parts and have to have their individual parts ready and able to test it and all of this kind of thing but in a single development environment you the the ability to be able to pull those things together quickly and test them does save a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of mistakes and things can be tested as you go a lot more effectively and efficiently you know you're kind of optimizing your own processes during the during the development period and then you know one of the biggest ones i guess which is i'm sure most people are aware of is you know it's it's future-proofing for the for the client you know we consider about the the multiple different global sites that the client is is looking towards and They obviously, some of these places are in remote environments. They're in countries that the supply chain may not be as robust as others. But whereas with the 61499, anyone who's offering a compliant product to that technology, we can easily make sure that that's available in that country and can be used. And obviously, we aren't dependent on a single vendor. collective group of a couple of vendors you know we've got much more flexibility in that approach and then that obviously you know the improved supply chain moving forward for spare parts you know breakdowns anything like that you know is is relatively straightforward and it certainly reduces the burden of of having to carry a lot more uh spare parts for the for the company as well so that that's about it from me um i'll pass that back to greg and i'll open the floor for any questions.
Speaker #1
Yes. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. And let's go to the chat and let's check some questions. I see one from Suat. Maybe we can read it together. What factors did you consider before deciding to start a project in UAO? And what does a company's journey look like from concept to commissioning? How about that?
Speaker #7
That's a good, great question. Two great questions, I should say. Yeah. So I think the factors before deciding to start the project were, for this particular one, it was really clear. The customer had a very specific set of goals. You know, they wanted to scale up really fast. It was clearly a modularized system from the outset. And I think that was the most important part of this. And plus, the level of data exchange and things that they needed to handle needed to be done in a simplistic way. So when I guess from looking at any project in this way, when you've got a data heavy project and something that you know that there's going to be a lot of hardware there eventually, you know, it's going to be in different places or, you know, there's going to be a lot of technological advances as they move forward as a company as well. I think, you know, 61499 lends itself to all of these things. It gives them something for the future. you know and i heard a great quote a few weeks ago where someone talked about a traditional plc and said you know traditional plc's were designed for electrical technicians you know it was an iteration of relay logic and the relay logic was uh something that they were already familiar with and it was something that they were all you know they were already competent at doing and you know creating that code was an extension of relay logic you know like putting it down on a piece of paper and deploying it as code. Whereas now, you know, We aren't so reliant on that. We're a lot more reliant on data, you know, the rise of AI and things like this, which can now start to be embedded. You know, we've talked about edge control in PLC projects for the last 10 years. You know, it's been available. But this accelerates that journey. It makes it more simplistic. You know, you can even run your code on a PC, Raspberry Pi. You know, Greg's got all the demos for all that kind of stuff. You can do that. And I think, you know, looking at the... the journey to take from concept to commissioning that is I think the the important part if we talk about the concept first is is listening and understanding the the needs of the customer and I think then you can formulate a strategy to move forward with them and I think there's a lot of considerations in the in the sense of people need to be trained you know they have they have new staff they need to be trained people need to be uh raise the awareness you know that's that's a big thing raise the awareness to the to the client to make sure that they you know they understand everything about it because the more information you can give to them in the outset you know the more benefits that they're going to see from the from the project and then you know working through the project i guess like any other project communication is is key um you know we during this project we had really good communication with the teams at aviva we had the really good communication with the teams at shiny electric we've got good support on the hardware you know that was that was paramount To us, you know, this is, like I said, it's with any new technology, you'll put the support mechanisms there. The guys at Universal Automation have the training and everything online that, you know, you can point people towards that kind of stuff. You know, and then in the commissioning sense, you know, it saves time by being able to test a lot of these things. It's a lot easier to test, I would certainly say, that than it is in a traditional sort of PLC setting because, you know, you can, you know, with it being on a... PC, you can emulate a lot of the things that you want to do as well, which is not necessarily that it is the case with 6.11.31 or traditional PLCs, but this is much more so specifically with the integration into the IT layer and the enterprise systems that it communicates with.
Speaker #1
Yeah, because I think this what you just said leads to the next question we just arrived. which is about how did programmers find it moving from 6.11.41 to 6.14.99? What's the journey and what did they see and encounter?
Speaker #7
Another good question. Thanks, Morgan. So yeah, I think it was more the way that we approached it as a company rather than the engineers being pushed from one place to another. And I've always said the same thing, you know, even talking about 6-11-31, when someone says, you know, I don't know how to program Siemens or I don't know how to program Rockwell or I don't know how to program this. You know, what they're actually saying to you is they're not familiar with that development environment. They're not saying that they don't know how to program it because they do. They're just not familiar with the environment that they need to use. And this is just another case of that. It's a different development environment. I think the more that, you know, you... you allow them to sort of learn for themselves, give them the time to spend to learn for themselves, keep them instructed on changes that are coming, you know, things that you see that are in the pipeline, you know, with some of the developments and things, you know, specifically with the UAO groups, you know, we talk about it a lot. And that was mainly the biggest challenge. And I think that, you know, when it boils down to it, you know, even when you get right down into the weeds of... a 61499 environment. It's structured text. It's something that a lot of people who program are familiar with. It's just the way that it's set up and the way that it's brought to the forefront that's different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's really true. And taking this question further, and I think you mentioned it a bit in your presentation. For me, one question still stays on the portability of the application. So it means that today you have done your project with a lot of products and mainly this time with product from Schneider Electric. Do you have an idea or could you please explain how much time it would take, for example, if you would have to change those products and take product from another supplier, for example, on your project? What does it cost and what's the difference between 6.99, what you do now, and... if you would have to do it in 6-11-31?
Speaker #7
Yeah, so we, I mean, if we had to go back and do this in 6-11-31 and change out.
Speaker #0
segments of parts there's a there's a lot of considerations to be had in there you know communications are one thing you know um network and everything else that you know a traditional plc the network adapters and all of this kind of thing that go with it um you know more process and power etc etc where we tested a lot of this at the start you know we did we did some some work internally on this and you know we we installed the environment on a standard laptop plc And we tested to see how quick we could change that between a PLC and a PC to do it. And it's really simple. You know, that's the beauty about it. You don't have to have, you know, you're not waiting in a supply chain to have it. You know, worst case scenario, I mean, I doubt that we would ever have to do this, but worst case scenario, if something did fail, you know, we can go and buy a laptop at the local electronics store and do something with that if we had to. You know, whereas we couldn't do that with a PC. plc at all so i think that's that's a a really good point and i think it's it's something that makes this technology a lot more simplistic yeah that gives us a good uh good idea what's what's different is between both both technologies i'm
Speaker #1
going uh through the question that's great we have many questions today so the next one from from dave you mentioned that component configuration added time to the project development Can you expand on that? What components require more time and why?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so some of the items that, you know, they come out of the box because they are, you know, some of the hardware was compliant with, you know, drives as an example, various few drives, just, you know, they're compliant with 6.11.31. So the firmware has to be changed. It's mainly to do with the configuration and the firmware changes that you have to do with standardized components more so than anything else and that's that's the reason for the for the additional time and obviously there was some uh changes to these firmwares you know that we had to keep abreast of and we we had to go back a couple of times and make those changes as the firmwares were released yeah
Speaker #1
okay that's good so i think last question for today from kevin during fat um phase of your testing, what percentage of time would you estimate was saved in comparison to the traditional PLC system? We speak about 30, 40 percent, etc.
Speaker #0
Yeah, again, it's a hard one to say for the factory acceptance testing at that portion of it, because how we did this was slightly different in the sense of, you know, a full factory acceptance test that would be, you know, it was in a different country, you know, we also were the EPC for all the control panels as well, so we had all of them at our site. We started with a test rig, so we built a test rig and then obviously with the single development environment as I mentioned earlier, a lot of time saved in that when you want to test the synchronization, you know, in our case to a VivaSystem platform. and insight as we used to there, we could have all of that done. You know, we had all the HMIs and everything within the actual CAT itself. So that did save a lot of time from that. It was a lot simpler than it would have been had you have to bring everyone together. So if you had to bring, you know, the guy who was doing the system platform, the guy who was doing the HMIs, the guy who was doing the PLC, and you have to bring all of them together as a collective team and do all that preparation work, make sure everyone's finished. their particular stage gate of that test and bring them together and do that. This was a lot more simplistic. So as a percentage, I would say that it's at least 30%. I couldn't tell you the exact figure, but I would say it was pretty close to that.
Speaker #1
Good. So I said it was the last question, but in fact, there was one in between which came in. So let's see if we can squeeze it in from Marc. Getting the whole new ecosystem, were there significant cost savings regarding hardware, software, infrastructure, install and commissioning? And is it a key selling point or are these benefits more engineering based?
Speaker #0
Another very good question. Yeah, cost saving wise, I would say yes, definitely. Because when you talk about, you know, you're talking about a reduction in the engineering time for the software development, so that's clear. But when you talk about hardware, because you have the flexibility to choose, there's some great offers you know if you wanted to go to a and do you know use a pc as opposed to a plc but you know especially the smaller machines and things like that that you know are really cost sensitive if you wanted to do that you've got the ability to have the edge analytics you've got the ability to have the runtime environment and everything just on a on a PC, whereas you may have needed an expensive... PLC, you know, comms cards, all of this kind of thing, you know, and then you're just using a remote I.O. adapter. You're connecting to your physical I.O. from the PC. You know, it's all it's all done from there. You're connecting to your HMI or your IPC if you want to have an IPC doing something else externally to that. It's a lot more about the agility of this as well. You know, it allows you to be a lot more creative in the way that you approach projects. So, you know, you can definitely save money. And I think that the benefits are twofold because, you know, we all know that we saw a huge disruption in supply chain over the last three to four years. You know, this technology eliminates, not all of it, but it eliminates a large portion of that. You know, and obviously without the vendor login, you've got so much more choice of who you use. you know why you use them the reasons that you use them and i think that's the the key selling point more than more than anything else mark good great great and um just uh i see another question from the chat coming in uh which
Speaker #1
is linked to platinum itself and the question is about if you offer consultation services for validation of uo projects yes yes we do so yeah um
Speaker #0
I mean, anything to do with 61499, you know, that's something that we're certainly interested in. You know, as a company, we now will only push forward with 61499 projects. We're that confident in the technology. You know, we believe in it. There's so many benefits and multifacets to this. You know, even looking at the sustainability piece, the reusability of code, you know, the time constraints, the ability of what you can do. with the code, the systems that you can link it into, you know, it's so much more versatile. And, you know, the creativity, I guess, from the start with looking at a project for 61499 is key, you know, and it's also key to the methods and the methodologies that people use within their own company to gain traction with a project as well, because, you know, we're fully aware that you do hit. the well-poisoner within the company, you know, the naysayer, the people who say this will never work, it's not this, it's not that well, it does, and you know, it's more about reassurance in that instance.
Speaker #1
I think that gives us a good idea of how the technology can be used and how you position yourself as well as the company, Platinum, I mean, as a member of Universal Automation Notorious. And I think that's the end of our... Q&A session. So I thank you all for being there, for seeing that. You see the contact details of Stephen, which are down on the screen. Stephen, I really thank you for sharing with us your experience with the Tx499, with the technology of universalautomation.org, and I hope that it will help the community to understand more what universalautomation.org is as a non-profit associations. I take the opportunity to say that we are a non-profit association we are acting globally and we are open for for new new joiners so new joiner our organization uh you could be user of automation you could be vendor information you could be working more in the academics or being an institute link to automation we welcome all of you so don't hesitate to to get back to us contact us on our linkedin page and uh we'll get back to you to uh for maybe a small meeting or uh or directly to to have you subscribing to the associations so thank you all again and i wish you a very nice end of the day bye thanks bye

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Speaker #1
Hi everybody and good day to you. My name is Greg Boucou and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Universal Automation at Hort. Today it's the third edition of our UAO Goes Live and we have the pleasure to be with Stephen Malby from the company Platinum. During this third session we'll learn more about the typical use case of using the UAO technology in a real use case and a real life application. So just as a... reminder, it's our third edition, so the two-thirds editions are viewable on either YouTube or LinkedIn. So have a look if you want to remind yourself about, for example, what is Universal Automation Network, which was the first episode, and the second was about use cases with the company called Emirin. So today, welcome on the stage, Stephen Malby, Martin, Director of Patreon. Hi, Steven.
Speaker #7
Hi, Greg. Thank you for allowing us to do this today.
Speaker #1
Yeah, pleasure to welcome you on stage with us. You want to show us one of your projects, so I leave you the floor, you can share your screen and we can go on.
Speaker #7
Okay, thank you. Just to check, can everyone see that?
Speaker #1
Yes, we can see it.
Speaker #7
Perfect. So welcome everyone, good day. I'll just tell you a little bit about the company itself first. So we're Platinum Electrical Engineering. We're a system integrations company based in just outside of Newcastle, northeast coast, United Kingdom. We have a reputation for being quite an innovative company. As you'll see from the project that I'm about to demonstrate, you know, we get involved in some quite advanced sort of technologies and things where new companies are coming to the market. They're trying to bring new products to the market, they're trying to bring new systems to the market and new processes to the market, so we get a lot involved with a lot of those staler companies. This particular company that I'm going to talk about now is a startup. The project is based out in the western provinces of Morocco, just on the outskirts of the Sahara Desert. So I guess if we have to talk about the segment that the project sits within, it's a water waste water and the end product is actually carbon capture technology. It's autonomous operations for local algae strains which are grown in controlled environments and then the algae is then treated sort of post-production and buried and the carbon that the algae's captured during the cycle is locked in for over a thousand years. So the beauty about this is that you know the company of huge mines of scientific research and bodies of work you know to get to this point it's it's has a really it's a really ambitious company it's relies on a huge amount of data to make very sort of conscious decisions about you know where in the growth cycle that the algae happens to be what should happen next you know how how will they protect the algae from from sort of external sources and things like that So this project has a lot of sensors that wouldn't typically be used within a standard industrial setting, you know, more of a lab-based style sensor or an oceanographic sensor in this instance. So the solution that we came up with for this particular project was a modularized architecture. So therefore, you know, the methodologies of 61499 language allowed us to create things and cut paste style to scale up where the company wanted to be. It has a direct synchronization to the enterprise layer of the IT systems with a secondary remote connection which sits in the company's headquarters just outside of London in the UK. The benefits I guess of doing it in this way is you know we could use 61499 to create the CATS which allowed the rapid scale up for future models of the site. Because they contain all of the information, they contain all the HMI code, they contain all of the synchronization with the enterprise system all within an asset-centric format. The code can then be redistributed around as many devices as you like. So, you know, from a decentralized point of view. As the scale-up continues, code can be moved around and load not necessarily sitting on one particular processor, it can be shifted between the devices. And also, as a prerequisite of this, a lot of the information which is gained out of lab-based experiments needs to be implemented in the actual real world. So the customer has to have the flexibility to be able to change parameters kind of on the fly or for a new batch. whatever that looks like. So some of the key elements of the requirements that we require for this system were algae growth is obviously, you know, it's a living organism. So it, you know, to get the best possible outcome, it requires a repeatable, reliable and accurate process. And that comes from, you know, all parts of the cycle from the initial growth cycle to, you know, when it's when it's moved between the ponds, as you see in the in the image there. It needs to be largely autonomous, so again you know you can see that the scale and the ambition of the site, it covers a lot of space, you know the coastal desert land that this site sits on is a strip of land about four kilometers by about 20 kilometers long I believe, so you know it has the potential to fill that site someday and it's very difficult to get people to go and look around that site. make checks, tests, whatever that requires. So the system kind of needs to bring in a lot of this data and a lot of this information and be able to self-control. Again, you know, modularity is key. The unique part of the growth cycle, I guess, has to be, you know, a certain fit, form and function from the elements of the ponds for the sizes, the dimensions, you know, the speed of the growth and all of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be repeatable over and over again on multiple different assets. The company have also identified multiple global sites. These each have a unique set of challenges, be that weather systems, be that localities and things like that. So there's a lot of consideration and there's a lot of work and effort goes into building one of these sites. It's very complicated. And obviously speed of scale. It's very important from a sustainability point of view. The algae is capturing carbon from the atmosphere. which is then being locked in. You know, every country in the world now, you know, has to hit climate targets. You know, everyone's aware of what's going on with the, you know, some of the environmental challenges that we're facing. So, you know, it's very important that companies like this can proceed at pace and start to capture some of that calm. So looking at the project itself from a hardware... and system topology. This is basically how it's set up. So in the top left hand side there, we have the Galaxy for the SCADA analytics and beyond SCADA for the enterprise level that runs on a historian. That also runs part of the software, which is a VivaSystem platform. And we have a client PC that sits next to that which is on site which runs the operations management interface. So that particular client PC will be sitting within the lab that's on site. So you know changes can be made, data can be monitored and everything that's going on at the particular site. Then we have a secondary remote client which is in the HQ in London. which is basically mimicking the on-site system obviously different user levels and restrictions and things like that are in place but that'll sit within within the lab environment in in london then uh also on site we have another pc which is an industrial pc which runs a thin client and that does some of the controls for the on-site operations so that's in a particular building on site and changes and data can be monitored from from that point as well in the actual operations side of things. There's also, if we go to the bottom there now, there's also an Edge PC, which sits there with part of the SCADA client for the on-site and does a little bit of data acquisition as well. Then from the control layer or the typical OT layer, as we know it, on-site we have the IO distributed in a local CPU. four separate places in this particular three separate places sorry in this particular instance so we we have uh key parts of the site so the load is spaced around the three processes as you see there there's also locally for hmis so they are traditional hmis in the sense of that they do start stop functions local controls local visualization close to the elements that they are actually controlling and then as well we have 16 variable speed drives which are doing various pumping operations transfers around the site. They will host some of the code they are all connected at 61499 as well and then at the top layer sort of outside of the SCADA system we have a cloud historian which is has a direct connection to the Aviva system platform as well as we publish some data via MQTT to that. that historian and then we reuse that data within a view system platform as well so as a simplified architecture to that you know as you can see starting down in the in the bottom right hand side we have the you know the the rs232 or the lab based devices you know the oceanographic sensors and that kind of thing which we we use some gateways to do protocol conversions so we can communicate to the uh to the plc's from there we have the traditional field devices as you would expect in any project you know pumps valves level sensors that kind of thing then we have the three distributed pc plc's and the hmis then we move up into you know the the apps and analytics layer and you can see you know we have the components of a viewer system platform there that the galaxy that runs on the server with various different drivers to publish wherever it happens to be and obviously to the to the far right um we have the the on-site uh thin client which is doing some of the controls some of the scada stuff there as well and then if we move to the bottom left hand side there's some some light waveform sensors which basically communicate over MQTT so we publish that over an MQTT broker and we push that into a package called Aviva Insight which is an online historian and then we use that from Aviva Insight into system platforms so we can extrapolate that data at the same time we have had some recognition for this a particular project last year and to the end of 2023 we won the robotics and automation award for innovation and sustainability and we were also awarded the schneider electric innovation award for for this particular project so i'm also moving into you know some real world answers and questions and things for when we look at 61499 you know some of the things that we've realized that that we, you know, we. We learned as we went with some challenges that we faced and some of the best practices that we we adopted. So one of the things was was firmware you know some of the products that can run 61499 can also be standard products you know typically the PCs are just standard PCs so you know there is some firmware changes and things that need to be made you know that these things have to be matched around the product so you know has to be some time for that and also to keep checking for film ever. updates. You know, this is a relatively new technology, but, you know, companies who are providing the hardware, you know, constantly updating the firmwares and constantly making changes and things like this. So, you know, it's important to keep looking for the firmware updates to make sure that you've got the latest and the best as part of the project. Then revision releases, we used the Schneider Electric Tool EcoStruxure Automation Expert. So it's constantly evolving, You know, they're adding new features. you know on a quarterly half yearly basis so you know throughout the project we we had to keep looking for constant revision releases and see how that would benefit the the customer you know to the to the end user and what changes we had to make to to suit those requirements. Some of the challenges that we faced you know it's about the awareness of 61499 you know everyone I believe is familiar with the traditional PLC as we know it you know it's been around for for a long long time you know various iterations of the plc but never really a huge innovation in that sense whereas 61499 is you know it's not something to be to be feared it's it's you know it's doing the same job as a plc it's just doing it in a very slightly different way and it's more about you know engaging with uh the people who who you know have some some questions and things about ISC 61499 to make sure that they're answered and you know that it's clear to them what the differences are and you know what they'll need to do within their organization to to be able to maintain the the code etc uh component configuration uh there was there was a lot more time for us in this project doing component configuration as it would be normally so that was something that you know we we weren't aware of when we started the project it was just something that we we learned as we went you know it took a considerable amount of time for that part of it. I think that will change as time moves on. You know, we have that knowledge now, so it's becoming easier for us as we go. And as far as the best practices go, you know, we kept really stringent records on this of what we did, what we changed, you know, why we changed it and the reasons for it because, you know, internally as a company ourselves, we have to train and educate our own people. So it's important that we gather this information. you know we make decisions about why we've changed things you know records of decision and why things were done in a certain way so that other people within the company can also learn from that and that goes on to the standard operating procedures as well the standard operating procedures obviously are important because you know you don't want to have to get everyone to learn the same thing over and over and over again whereas if you've got a standard operating procedure in place it simplifies it for the next you know the next engineers who are going to be working on similar projects or all the same project. and they can see that what's already been done, and then that saves a lot of time for those guys. So the benefits as we see it, you know, from using the technology, it was very simple to handle client changes and modifications because usually, you know, in the traditional sense, we would do a hardware selection first. We would make sure there was enough IO. We would, you know, there's all of these considerations around the hardware that we didn't really have to concern ourselves with because we knew we could place the code where we wanted to place it we knew that we could uh make make changes you know to the code without affecting the hardware in the hardware selection in in that sense and then we could just add the additional hardware whatever that happened to be you know with this you know there's a lot of there's a lot of uh options out there you know there's more manufacturers come to the market with 61499 uh compliant technologies We saw vast improvement in the interface of the SCADA system and by that I mean specifically a VivaSystem platform. The Schneider Electric EcoStruxural Automation Expert offer has a direct synchronisation to a VivaSystem platform and that saved a lot of time and it did reduce our time in testing, our time in being able to understand. to make sure that everything was present in that SCADA layer or in the enterprise layer as as you see it you know that and that we estimate that that reduced our time by about 25 to 30 because of the the the style of the single integrated development environment that EA provides it also makes it a lot easier to collaborate efforts so you can across teams in our sense because usually you would have you know someone who was working on the HMI, someone who was working on system platform, someone who was working on the PLC code and all of those people have to come together you know with their individual parts and have to have their individual parts ready and able to test it and all of this kind of thing but in a single development environment you the the ability to be able to pull those things together quickly and test them does save a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of mistakes and things can be tested as you go a lot more effectively and efficiently you know you're kind of optimizing your own processes during the during the development period and then you know one of the biggest ones i guess which is i'm sure most people are aware of is you know it's it's future-proofing for the for the client you know we consider about the the multiple different global sites that the client is is looking towards and They obviously, some of these places are in remote environments. They're in countries that the supply chain may not be as robust as others. But whereas with the 61499, anyone who's offering a compliant product to that technology, we can easily make sure that that's available in that country and can be used. And obviously, we aren't dependent on a single vendor. collective group of a couple of vendors you know we've got much more flexibility in that approach and then that obviously you know the improved supply chain moving forward for spare parts you know breakdowns anything like that you know is is relatively straightforward and it certainly reduces the burden of of having to carry a lot more uh spare parts for the for the company as well so that that's about it from me um i'll pass that back to greg and i'll open the floor for any questions.
Speaker #1
Yes. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. And let's go to the chat and let's check some questions. I see one from Suat. Maybe we can read it together. What factors did you consider before deciding to start a project in UAO? And what does a company's journey look like from concept to commissioning? How about that?
Speaker #7
That's a good, great question. Two great questions, I should say. Yeah. So I think the factors before deciding to start the project were, for this particular one, it was really clear. The customer had a very specific set of goals. You know, they wanted to scale up really fast. It was clearly a modularized system from the outset. And I think that was the most important part of this. And plus, the level of data exchange and things that they needed to handle needed to be done in a simplistic way. So when I guess from looking at any project in this way, when you've got a data heavy project and something that you know that there's going to be a lot of hardware there eventually, you know, it's going to be in different places or, you know, there's going to be a lot of technological advances as they move forward as a company as well. I think, you know, 61499 lends itself to all of these things. It gives them something for the future. you know and i heard a great quote a few weeks ago where someone talked about a traditional plc and said you know traditional plc's were designed for electrical technicians you know it was an iteration of relay logic and the relay logic was uh something that they were already familiar with and it was something that they were all you know they were already competent at doing and you know creating that code was an extension of relay logic you know like putting it down on a piece of paper and deploying it as code. Whereas now, you know, We aren't so reliant on that. We're a lot more reliant on data, you know, the rise of AI and things like this, which can now start to be embedded. You know, we've talked about edge control in PLC projects for the last 10 years. You know, it's been available. But this accelerates that journey. It makes it more simplistic. You know, you can even run your code on a PC, Raspberry Pi. You know, Greg's got all the demos for all that kind of stuff. You can do that. And I think, you know, looking at the... the journey to take from concept to commissioning that is I think the the important part if we talk about the concept first is is listening and understanding the the needs of the customer and I think then you can formulate a strategy to move forward with them and I think there's a lot of considerations in the in the sense of people need to be trained you know they have they have new staff they need to be trained people need to be uh raise the awareness you know that's that's a big thing raise the awareness to the to the client to make sure that they you know they understand everything about it because the more information you can give to them in the outset you know the more benefits that they're going to see from the from the project and then you know working through the project i guess like any other project communication is is key um you know we during this project we had really good communication with the teams at aviva we had the really good communication with the teams at shiny electric we've got good support on the hardware you know that was that was paramount To us, you know, this is, like I said, it's with any new technology, you'll put the support mechanisms there. The guys at Universal Automation have the training and everything online that, you know, you can point people towards that kind of stuff. You know, and then in the commissioning sense, you know, it saves time by being able to test a lot of these things. It's a lot easier to test, I would certainly say, that than it is in a traditional sort of PLC setting because, you know, you can, you know, with it being on a... PC, you can emulate a lot of the things that you want to do as well, which is not necessarily that it is the case with 6.11.31 or traditional PLCs, but this is much more so specifically with the integration into the IT layer and the enterprise systems that it communicates with.
Speaker #1
Yeah, because I think this what you just said leads to the next question we just arrived. which is about how did programmers find it moving from 6.11.41 to 6.14.99? What's the journey and what did they see and encounter?
Speaker #7
Another good question. Thanks, Morgan. So yeah, I think it was more the way that we approached it as a company rather than the engineers being pushed from one place to another. And I've always said the same thing, you know, even talking about 6-11-31, when someone says, you know, I don't know how to program Siemens or I don't know how to program Rockwell or I don't know how to program this. You know, what they're actually saying to you is they're not familiar with that development environment. They're not saying that they don't know how to program it because they do. They're just not familiar with the environment that they need to use. And this is just another case of that. It's a different development environment. I think the more that, you know, you... you allow them to sort of learn for themselves, give them the time to spend to learn for themselves, keep them instructed on changes that are coming, you know, things that you see that are in the pipeline, you know, with some of the developments and things, you know, specifically with the UAO groups, you know, we talk about it a lot. And that was mainly the biggest challenge. And I think that, you know, when it boils down to it, you know, even when you get right down into the weeds of... a 61499 environment. It's structured text. It's something that a lot of people who program are familiar with. It's just the way that it's set up and the way that it's brought to the forefront that's different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's really true. And taking this question further, and I think you mentioned it a bit in your presentation. For me, one question still stays on the portability of the application. So it means that today you have done your project with a lot of products and mainly this time with product from Schneider Electric. Do you have an idea or could you please explain how much time it would take, for example, if you would have to change those products and take product from another supplier, for example, on your project? What does it cost and what's the difference between 6.99, what you do now, and... if you would have to do it in 6-11-31?
Speaker #7
Yeah, so we, I mean, if we had to go back and do this in 6-11-31 and change out.
Speaker #0
segments of parts there's a there's a lot of considerations to be had in there you know communications are one thing you know um network and everything else that you know a traditional plc the network adapters and all of this kind of thing that go with it um you know more process and power etc etc where we tested a lot of this at the start you know we did we did some some work internally on this and you know we we installed the environment on a standard laptop plc And we tested to see how quick we could change that between a PLC and a PC to do it. And it's really simple. You know, that's the beauty about it. You don't have to have, you know, you're not waiting in a supply chain to have it. You know, worst case scenario, I mean, I doubt that we would ever have to do this, but worst case scenario, if something did fail, you know, we can go and buy a laptop at the local electronics store and do something with that if we had to. You know, whereas we couldn't do that with a PC. plc at all so i think that's that's a a really good point and i think it's it's something that makes this technology a lot more simplistic yeah that gives us a good uh good idea what's what's different is between both both technologies i'm
Speaker #1
going uh through the question that's great we have many questions today so the next one from from dave you mentioned that component configuration added time to the project development Can you expand on that? What components require more time and why?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so some of the items that, you know, they come out of the box because they are, you know, some of the hardware was compliant with, you know, drives as an example, various few drives, just, you know, they're compliant with 6.11.31. So the firmware has to be changed. It's mainly to do with the configuration and the firmware changes that you have to do with standardized components more so than anything else and that's that's the reason for the for the additional time and obviously there was some uh changes to these firmwares you know that we had to keep abreast of and we we had to go back a couple of times and make those changes as the firmwares were released yeah
Speaker #1
okay that's good so i think last question for today from kevin during fat um phase of your testing, what percentage of time would you estimate was saved in comparison to the traditional PLC system? We speak about 30, 40 percent, etc.
Speaker #0
Yeah, again, it's a hard one to say for the factory acceptance testing at that portion of it, because how we did this was slightly different in the sense of, you know, a full factory acceptance test that would be, you know, it was in a different country, you know, we also were the EPC for all the control panels as well, so we had all of them at our site. We started with a test rig, so we built a test rig and then obviously with the single development environment as I mentioned earlier, a lot of time saved in that when you want to test the synchronization, you know, in our case to a VivaSystem platform. and insight as we used to there, we could have all of that done. You know, we had all the HMIs and everything within the actual CAT itself. So that did save a lot of time from that. It was a lot simpler than it would have been had you have to bring everyone together. So if you had to bring, you know, the guy who was doing the system platform, the guy who was doing the HMIs, the guy who was doing the PLC, and you have to bring all of them together as a collective team and do all that preparation work, make sure everyone's finished. their particular stage gate of that test and bring them together and do that. This was a lot more simplistic. So as a percentage, I would say that it's at least 30%. I couldn't tell you the exact figure, but I would say it was pretty close to that.
Speaker #1
Good. So I said it was the last question, but in fact, there was one in between which came in. So let's see if we can squeeze it in from Marc. Getting the whole new ecosystem, were there significant cost savings regarding hardware, software, infrastructure, install and commissioning? And is it a key selling point or are these benefits more engineering based?
Speaker #0
Another very good question. Yeah, cost saving wise, I would say yes, definitely. Because when you talk about, you know, you're talking about a reduction in the engineering time for the software development, so that's clear. But when you talk about hardware, because you have the flexibility to choose, there's some great offers you know if you wanted to go to a and do you know use a pc as opposed to a plc but you know especially the smaller machines and things like that that you know are really cost sensitive if you wanted to do that you've got the ability to have the edge analytics you've got the ability to have the runtime environment and everything just on a on a PC, whereas you may have needed an expensive... PLC, you know, comms cards, all of this kind of thing, you know, and then you're just using a remote I.O. adapter. You're connecting to your physical I.O. from the PC. You know, it's all it's all done from there. You're connecting to your HMI or your IPC if you want to have an IPC doing something else externally to that. It's a lot more about the agility of this as well. You know, it allows you to be a lot more creative in the way that you approach projects. So, you know, you can definitely save money. And I think that the benefits are twofold because, you know, we all know that we saw a huge disruption in supply chain over the last three to four years. You know, this technology eliminates, not all of it, but it eliminates a large portion of that. You know, and obviously without the vendor login, you've got so much more choice of who you use. you know why you use them the reasons that you use them and i think that's the the key selling point more than more than anything else mark good great great and um just uh i see another question from the chat coming in uh which
Speaker #1
is linked to platinum itself and the question is about if you offer consultation services for validation of uo projects yes yes we do so yeah um
Speaker #0
I mean, anything to do with 61499, you know, that's something that we're certainly interested in. You know, as a company, we now will only push forward with 61499 projects. We're that confident in the technology. You know, we believe in it. There's so many benefits and multifacets to this. You know, even looking at the sustainability piece, the reusability of code, you know, the time constraints, the ability of what you can do. with the code, the systems that you can link it into, you know, it's so much more versatile. And, you know, the creativity, I guess, from the start with looking at a project for 61499 is key, you know, and it's also key to the methods and the methodologies that people use within their own company to gain traction with a project as well, because, you know, we're fully aware that you do hit. the well-poisoner within the company, you know, the naysayer, the people who say this will never work, it's not this, it's not that well, it does, and you know, it's more about reassurance in that instance.
Speaker #1
I think that gives us a good idea of how the technology can be used and how you position yourself as well as the company, Platinum, I mean, as a member of Universal Automation Notorious. And I think that's the end of our... Q&A session. So I thank you all for being there, for seeing that. You see the contact details of Stephen, which are down on the screen. Stephen, I really thank you for sharing with us your experience with the Tx499, with the technology of universalautomation.org, and I hope that it will help the community to understand more what universalautomation.org is as a non-profit associations. I take the opportunity to say that we are a non-profit association we are acting globally and we are open for for new new joiners so new joiner our organization uh you could be user of automation you could be vendor information you could be working more in the academics or being an institute link to automation we welcome all of you so don't hesitate to to get back to us contact us on our linkedin page and uh we'll get back to you to uh for maybe a small meeting or uh or directly to to have you subscribing to the associations so thank you all again and i wish you a very nice end of the day bye thanks bye

About UAO Goes Live: The Future of Automation

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About UAO Goes Live: The Future of Automation

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Description

About UniversalAutomation.org (UAO)

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Transcription

Speaker #1
Hi everybody and good day to you. My name is Greg Boucou and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Universal Automation at Hort. Today it's the third edition of our UAO Goes Live and we have the pleasure to be with Stephen Malby from the company Platinum. During this third session we'll learn more about the typical use case of using the UAO technology in a real use case and a real life application. So just as a... reminder, it's our third edition, so the two-thirds editions are viewable on either YouTube or LinkedIn. So have a look if you want to remind yourself about, for example, what is Universal Automation Network, which was the first episode, and the second was about use cases with the company called Emirin. So today, welcome on the stage, Stephen Malby, Martin, Director of Patreon. Hi, Steven.
Speaker #7
Hi, Greg. Thank you for allowing us to do this today.
Speaker #1
Yeah, pleasure to welcome you on stage with us. You want to show us one of your projects, so I leave you the floor, you can share your screen and we can go on.
Speaker #7
Okay, thank you. Just to check, can everyone see that?
Speaker #1
Yes, we can see it.
Speaker #7
Perfect. So welcome everyone, good day. I'll just tell you a little bit about the company itself first. So we're Platinum Electrical Engineering. We're a system integrations company based in just outside of Newcastle, northeast coast, United Kingdom. We have a reputation for being quite an innovative company. As you'll see from the project that I'm about to demonstrate, you know, we get involved in some quite advanced sort of technologies and things where new companies are coming to the market. They're trying to bring new products to the market, they're trying to bring new systems to the market and new processes to the market, so we get a lot involved with a lot of those staler companies. This particular company that I'm going to talk about now is a startup. The project is based out in the western provinces of Morocco, just on the outskirts of the Sahara Desert. So I guess if we have to talk about the segment that the project sits within, it's a water waste water and the end product is actually carbon capture technology. It's autonomous operations for local algae strains which are grown in controlled environments and then the algae is then treated sort of post-production and buried and the carbon that the algae's captured during the cycle is locked in for over a thousand years. So the beauty about this is that you know the company of huge mines of scientific research and bodies of work you know to get to this point it's it's has a really it's a really ambitious company it's relies on a huge amount of data to make very sort of conscious decisions about you know where in the growth cycle that the algae happens to be what should happen next you know how how will they protect the algae from from sort of external sources and things like that So this project has a lot of sensors that wouldn't typically be used within a standard industrial setting, you know, more of a lab-based style sensor or an oceanographic sensor in this instance. So the solution that we came up with for this particular project was a modularized architecture. So therefore, you know, the methodologies of 61499 language allowed us to create things and cut paste style to scale up where the company wanted to be. It has a direct synchronization to the enterprise layer of the IT systems with a secondary remote connection which sits in the company's headquarters just outside of London in the UK. The benefits I guess of doing it in this way is you know we could use 61499 to create the CATS which allowed the rapid scale up for future models of the site. Because they contain all of the information, they contain all the HMI code, they contain all of the synchronization with the enterprise system all within an asset-centric format. The code can then be redistributed around as many devices as you like. So, you know, from a decentralized point of view. As the scale-up continues, code can be moved around and load not necessarily sitting on one particular processor, it can be shifted between the devices. And also, as a prerequisite of this, a lot of the information which is gained out of lab-based experiments needs to be implemented in the actual real world. So the customer has to have the flexibility to be able to change parameters kind of on the fly or for a new batch. whatever that looks like. So some of the key elements of the requirements that we require for this system were algae growth is obviously, you know, it's a living organism. So it, you know, to get the best possible outcome, it requires a repeatable, reliable and accurate process. And that comes from, you know, all parts of the cycle from the initial growth cycle to, you know, when it's when it's moved between the ponds, as you see in the in the image there. It needs to be largely autonomous, so again you know you can see that the scale and the ambition of the site, it covers a lot of space, you know the coastal desert land that this site sits on is a strip of land about four kilometers by about 20 kilometers long I believe, so you know it has the potential to fill that site someday and it's very difficult to get people to go and look around that site. make checks, tests, whatever that requires. So the system kind of needs to bring in a lot of this data and a lot of this information and be able to self-control. Again, you know, modularity is key. The unique part of the growth cycle, I guess, has to be, you know, a certain fit, form and function from the elements of the ponds for the sizes, the dimensions, you know, the speed of the growth and all of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be repeatable over and over again on multiple different assets. The company have also identified multiple global sites. These each have a unique set of challenges, be that weather systems, be that localities and things like that. So there's a lot of consideration and there's a lot of work and effort goes into building one of these sites. It's very complicated. And obviously speed of scale. It's very important from a sustainability point of view. The algae is capturing carbon from the atmosphere. which is then being locked in. You know, every country in the world now, you know, has to hit climate targets. You know, everyone's aware of what's going on with the, you know, some of the environmental challenges that we're facing. So, you know, it's very important that companies like this can proceed at pace and start to capture some of that calm. So looking at the project itself from a hardware... and system topology. This is basically how it's set up. So in the top left hand side there, we have the Galaxy for the SCADA analytics and beyond SCADA for the enterprise level that runs on a historian. That also runs part of the software, which is a VivaSystem platform. And we have a client PC that sits next to that which is on site which runs the operations management interface. So that particular client PC will be sitting within the lab that's on site. So you know changes can be made, data can be monitored and everything that's going on at the particular site. Then we have a secondary remote client which is in the HQ in London. which is basically mimicking the on-site system obviously different user levels and restrictions and things like that are in place but that'll sit within within the lab environment in in london then uh also on site we have another pc which is an industrial pc which runs a thin client and that does some of the controls for the on-site operations so that's in a particular building on site and changes and data can be monitored from from that point as well in the actual operations side of things. There's also, if we go to the bottom there now, there's also an Edge PC, which sits there with part of the SCADA client for the on-site and does a little bit of data acquisition as well. Then from the control layer or the typical OT layer, as we know it, on-site we have the IO distributed in a local CPU. four separate places in this particular three separate places sorry in this particular instance so we we have uh key parts of the site so the load is spaced around the three processes as you see there there's also locally for hmis so they are traditional hmis in the sense of that they do start stop functions local controls local visualization close to the elements that they are actually controlling and then as well we have 16 variable speed drives which are doing various pumping operations transfers around the site. They will host some of the code they are all connected at 61499 as well and then at the top layer sort of outside of the SCADA system we have a cloud historian which is has a direct connection to the Aviva system platform as well as we publish some data via MQTT to that. that historian and then we reuse that data within a view system platform as well so as a simplified architecture to that you know as you can see starting down in the in the bottom right hand side we have the you know the the rs232 or the lab based devices you know the oceanographic sensors and that kind of thing which we we use some gateways to do protocol conversions so we can communicate to the uh to the plc's from there we have the traditional field devices as you would expect in any project you know pumps valves level sensors that kind of thing then we have the three distributed pc plc's and the hmis then we move up into you know the the apps and analytics layer and you can see you know we have the components of a viewer system platform there that the galaxy that runs on the server with various different drivers to publish wherever it happens to be and obviously to the to the far right um we have the the on-site uh thin client which is doing some of the controls some of the scada stuff there as well and then if we move to the bottom left hand side there's some some light waveform sensors which basically communicate over MQTT so we publish that over an MQTT broker and we push that into a package called Aviva Insight which is an online historian and then we use that from Aviva Insight into system platforms so we can extrapolate that data at the same time we have had some recognition for this a particular project last year and to the end of 2023 we won the robotics and automation award for innovation and sustainability and we were also awarded the schneider electric innovation award for for this particular project so i'm also moving into you know some real world answers and questions and things for when we look at 61499 you know some of the things that we've realized that that we, you know, we. We learned as we went with some challenges that we faced and some of the best practices that we we adopted. So one of the things was was firmware you know some of the products that can run 61499 can also be standard products you know typically the PCs are just standard PCs so you know there is some firmware changes and things that need to be made you know that these things have to be matched around the product so you know has to be some time for that and also to keep checking for film ever. updates. You know, this is a relatively new technology, but, you know, companies who are providing the hardware, you know, constantly updating the firmwares and constantly making changes and things like this. So, you know, it's important to keep looking for the firmware updates to make sure that you've got the latest and the best as part of the project. Then revision releases, we used the Schneider Electric Tool EcoStruxure Automation Expert. So it's constantly evolving, You know, they're adding new features. you know on a quarterly half yearly basis so you know throughout the project we we had to keep looking for constant revision releases and see how that would benefit the the customer you know to the to the end user and what changes we had to make to to suit those requirements. Some of the challenges that we faced you know it's about the awareness of 61499 you know everyone I believe is familiar with the traditional PLC as we know it you know it's been around for for a long long time you know various iterations of the plc but never really a huge innovation in that sense whereas 61499 is you know it's not something to be to be feared it's it's you know it's doing the same job as a plc it's just doing it in a very slightly different way and it's more about you know engaging with uh the people who who you know have some some questions and things about ISC 61499 to make sure that they're answered and you know that it's clear to them what the differences are and you know what they'll need to do within their organization to to be able to maintain the the code etc uh component configuration uh there was there was a lot more time for us in this project doing component configuration as it would be normally so that was something that you know we we weren't aware of when we started the project it was just something that we we learned as we went you know it took a considerable amount of time for that part of it. I think that will change as time moves on. You know, we have that knowledge now, so it's becoming easier for us as we go. And as far as the best practices go, you know, we kept really stringent records on this of what we did, what we changed, you know, why we changed it and the reasons for it because, you know, internally as a company ourselves, we have to train and educate our own people. So it's important that we gather this information. you know we make decisions about why we've changed things you know records of decision and why things were done in a certain way so that other people within the company can also learn from that and that goes on to the standard operating procedures as well the standard operating procedures obviously are important because you know you don't want to have to get everyone to learn the same thing over and over and over again whereas if you've got a standard operating procedure in place it simplifies it for the next you know the next engineers who are going to be working on similar projects or all the same project. and they can see that what's already been done, and then that saves a lot of time for those guys. So the benefits as we see it, you know, from using the technology, it was very simple to handle client changes and modifications because usually, you know, in the traditional sense, we would do a hardware selection first. We would make sure there was enough IO. We would, you know, there's all of these considerations around the hardware that we didn't really have to concern ourselves with because we knew we could place the code where we wanted to place it we knew that we could uh make make changes you know to the code without affecting the hardware in the hardware selection in in that sense and then we could just add the additional hardware whatever that happened to be you know with this you know there's a lot of there's a lot of uh options out there you know there's more manufacturers come to the market with 61499 uh compliant technologies We saw vast improvement in the interface of the SCADA system and by that I mean specifically a VivaSystem platform. The Schneider Electric EcoStruxural Automation Expert offer has a direct synchronisation to a VivaSystem platform and that saved a lot of time and it did reduce our time in testing, our time in being able to understand. to make sure that everything was present in that SCADA layer or in the enterprise layer as as you see it you know that and that we estimate that that reduced our time by about 25 to 30 because of the the the style of the single integrated development environment that EA provides it also makes it a lot easier to collaborate efforts so you can across teams in our sense because usually you would have you know someone who was working on the HMI, someone who was working on system platform, someone who was working on the PLC code and all of those people have to come together you know with their individual parts and have to have their individual parts ready and able to test it and all of this kind of thing but in a single development environment you the the ability to be able to pull those things together quickly and test them does save a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of mistakes and things can be tested as you go a lot more effectively and efficiently you know you're kind of optimizing your own processes during the during the development period and then you know one of the biggest ones i guess which is i'm sure most people are aware of is you know it's it's future-proofing for the for the client you know we consider about the the multiple different global sites that the client is is looking towards and They obviously, some of these places are in remote environments. They're in countries that the supply chain may not be as robust as others. But whereas with the 61499, anyone who's offering a compliant product to that technology, we can easily make sure that that's available in that country and can be used. And obviously, we aren't dependent on a single vendor. collective group of a couple of vendors you know we've got much more flexibility in that approach and then that obviously you know the improved supply chain moving forward for spare parts you know breakdowns anything like that you know is is relatively straightforward and it certainly reduces the burden of of having to carry a lot more uh spare parts for the for the company as well so that that's about it from me um i'll pass that back to greg and i'll open the floor for any questions.
Speaker #1
Yes. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. And let's go to the chat and let's check some questions. I see one from Suat. Maybe we can read it together. What factors did you consider before deciding to start a project in UAO? And what does a company's journey look like from concept to commissioning? How about that?
Speaker #7
That's a good, great question. Two great questions, I should say. Yeah. So I think the factors before deciding to start the project were, for this particular one, it was really clear. The customer had a very specific set of goals. You know, they wanted to scale up really fast. It was clearly a modularized system from the outset. And I think that was the most important part of this. And plus, the level of data exchange and things that they needed to handle needed to be done in a simplistic way. So when I guess from looking at any project in this way, when you've got a data heavy project and something that you know that there's going to be a lot of hardware there eventually, you know, it's going to be in different places or, you know, there's going to be a lot of technological advances as they move forward as a company as well. I think, you know, 61499 lends itself to all of these things. It gives them something for the future. you know and i heard a great quote a few weeks ago where someone talked about a traditional plc and said you know traditional plc's were designed for electrical technicians you know it was an iteration of relay logic and the relay logic was uh something that they were already familiar with and it was something that they were all you know they were already competent at doing and you know creating that code was an extension of relay logic you know like putting it down on a piece of paper and deploying it as code. Whereas now, you know, We aren't so reliant on that. We're a lot more reliant on data, you know, the rise of AI and things like this, which can now start to be embedded. You know, we've talked about edge control in PLC projects for the last 10 years. You know, it's been available. But this accelerates that journey. It makes it more simplistic. You know, you can even run your code on a PC, Raspberry Pi. You know, Greg's got all the demos for all that kind of stuff. You can do that. And I think, you know, looking at the... the journey to take from concept to commissioning that is I think the the important part if we talk about the concept first is is listening and understanding the the needs of the customer and I think then you can formulate a strategy to move forward with them and I think there's a lot of considerations in the in the sense of people need to be trained you know they have they have new staff they need to be trained people need to be uh raise the awareness you know that's that's a big thing raise the awareness to the to the client to make sure that they you know they understand everything about it because the more information you can give to them in the outset you know the more benefits that they're going to see from the from the project and then you know working through the project i guess like any other project communication is is key um you know we during this project we had really good communication with the teams at aviva we had the really good communication with the teams at shiny electric we've got good support on the hardware you know that was that was paramount To us, you know, this is, like I said, it's with any new technology, you'll put the support mechanisms there. The guys at Universal Automation have the training and everything online that, you know, you can point people towards that kind of stuff. You know, and then in the commissioning sense, you know, it saves time by being able to test a lot of these things. It's a lot easier to test, I would certainly say, that than it is in a traditional sort of PLC setting because, you know, you can, you know, with it being on a... PC, you can emulate a lot of the things that you want to do as well, which is not necessarily that it is the case with 6.11.31 or traditional PLCs, but this is much more so specifically with the integration into the IT layer and the enterprise systems that it communicates with.
Speaker #1
Yeah, because I think this what you just said leads to the next question we just arrived. which is about how did programmers find it moving from 6.11.41 to 6.14.99? What's the journey and what did they see and encounter?
Speaker #7
Another good question. Thanks, Morgan. So yeah, I think it was more the way that we approached it as a company rather than the engineers being pushed from one place to another. And I've always said the same thing, you know, even talking about 6-11-31, when someone says, you know, I don't know how to program Siemens or I don't know how to program Rockwell or I don't know how to program this. You know, what they're actually saying to you is they're not familiar with that development environment. They're not saying that they don't know how to program it because they do. They're just not familiar with the environment that they need to use. And this is just another case of that. It's a different development environment. I think the more that, you know, you... you allow them to sort of learn for themselves, give them the time to spend to learn for themselves, keep them instructed on changes that are coming, you know, things that you see that are in the pipeline, you know, with some of the developments and things, you know, specifically with the UAO groups, you know, we talk about it a lot. And that was mainly the biggest challenge. And I think that, you know, when it boils down to it, you know, even when you get right down into the weeds of... a 61499 environment. It's structured text. It's something that a lot of people who program are familiar with. It's just the way that it's set up and the way that it's brought to the forefront that's different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's really true. And taking this question further, and I think you mentioned it a bit in your presentation. For me, one question still stays on the portability of the application. So it means that today you have done your project with a lot of products and mainly this time with product from Schneider Electric. Do you have an idea or could you please explain how much time it would take, for example, if you would have to change those products and take product from another supplier, for example, on your project? What does it cost and what's the difference between 6.99, what you do now, and... if you would have to do it in 6-11-31?
Speaker #7
Yeah, so we, I mean, if we had to go back and do this in 6-11-31 and change out.
Speaker #0
segments of parts there's a there's a lot of considerations to be had in there you know communications are one thing you know um network and everything else that you know a traditional plc the network adapters and all of this kind of thing that go with it um you know more process and power etc etc where we tested a lot of this at the start you know we did we did some some work internally on this and you know we we installed the environment on a standard laptop plc And we tested to see how quick we could change that between a PLC and a PC to do it. And it's really simple. You know, that's the beauty about it. You don't have to have, you know, you're not waiting in a supply chain to have it. You know, worst case scenario, I mean, I doubt that we would ever have to do this, but worst case scenario, if something did fail, you know, we can go and buy a laptop at the local electronics store and do something with that if we had to. You know, whereas we couldn't do that with a PC. plc at all so i think that's that's a a really good point and i think it's it's something that makes this technology a lot more simplistic yeah that gives us a good uh good idea what's what's different is between both both technologies i'm
Speaker #1
going uh through the question that's great we have many questions today so the next one from from dave you mentioned that component configuration added time to the project development Can you expand on that? What components require more time and why?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so some of the items that, you know, they come out of the box because they are, you know, some of the hardware was compliant with, you know, drives as an example, various few drives, just, you know, they're compliant with 6.11.31. So the firmware has to be changed. It's mainly to do with the configuration and the firmware changes that you have to do with standardized components more so than anything else and that's that's the reason for the for the additional time and obviously there was some uh changes to these firmwares you know that we had to keep abreast of and we we had to go back a couple of times and make those changes as the firmwares were released yeah
Speaker #1
okay that's good so i think last question for today from kevin during fat um phase of your testing, what percentage of time would you estimate was saved in comparison to the traditional PLC system? We speak about 30, 40 percent, etc.
Speaker #0
Yeah, again, it's a hard one to say for the factory acceptance testing at that portion of it, because how we did this was slightly different in the sense of, you know, a full factory acceptance test that would be, you know, it was in a different country, you know, we also were the EPC for all the control panels as well, so we had all of them at our site. We started with a test rig, so we built a test rig and then obviously with the single development environment as I mentioned earlier, a lot of time saved in that when you want to test the synchronization, you know, in our case to a VivaSystem platform. and insight as we used to there, we could have all of that done. You know, we had all the HMIs and everything within the actual CAT itself. So that did save a lot of time from that. It was a lot simpler than it would have been had you have to bring everyone together. So if you had to bring, you know, the guy who was doing the system platform, the guy who was doing the HMIs, the guy who was doing the PLC, and you have to bring all of them together as a collective team and do all that preparation work, make sure everyone's finished. their particular stage gate of that test and bring them together and do that. This was a lot more simplistic. So as a percentage, I would say that it's at least 30%. I couldn't tell you the exact figure, but I would say it was pretty close to that.
Speaker #1
Good. So I said it was the last question, but in fact, there was one in between which came in. So let's see if we can squeeze it in from Marc. Getting the whole new ecosystem, were there significant cost savings regarding hardware, software, infrastructure, install and commissioning? And is it a key selling point or are these benefits more engineering based?
Speaker #0
Another very good question. Yeah, cost saving wise, I would say yes, definitely. Because when you talk about, you know, you're talking about a reduction in the engineering time for the software development, so that's clear. But when you talk about hardware, because you have the flexibility to choose, there's some great offers you know if you wanted to go to a and do you know use a pc as opposed to a plc but you know especially the smaller machines and things like that that you know are really cost sensitive if you wanted to do that you've got the ability to have the edge analytics you've got the ability to have the runtime environment and everything just on a on a PC, whereas you may have needed an expensive... PLC, you know, comms cards, all of this kind of thing, you know, and then you're just using a remote I.O. adapter. You're connecting to your physical I.O. from the PC. You know, it's all it's all done from there. You're connecting to your HMI or your IPC if you want to have an IPC doing something else externally to that. It's a lot more about the agility of this as well. You know, it allows you to be a lot more creative in the way that you approach projects. So, you know, you can definitely save money. And I think that the benefits are twofold because, you know, we all know that we saw a huge disruption in supply chain over the last three to four years. You know, this technology eliminates, not all of it, but it eliminates a large portion of that. You know, and obviously without the vendor login, you've got so much more choice of who you use. you know why you use them the reasons that you use them and i think that's the the key selling point more than more than anything else mark good great great and um just uh i see another question from the chat coming in uh which
Speaker #1
is linked to platinum itself and the question is about if you offer consultation services for validation of uo projects yes yes we do so yeah um
Speaker #0
I mean, anything to do with 61499, you know, that's something that we're certainly interested in. You know, as a company, we now will only push forward with 61499 projects. We're that confident in the technology. You know, we believe in it. There's so many benefits and multifacets to this. You know, even looking at the sustainability piece, the reusability of code, you know, the time constraints, the ability of what you can do. with the code, the systems that you can link it into, you know, it's so much more versatile. And, you know, the creativity, I guess, from the start with looking at a project for 61499 is key, you know, and it's also key to the methods and the methodologies that people use within their own company to gain traction with a project as well, because, you know, we're fully aware that you do hit. the well-poisoner within the company, you know, the naysayer, the people who say this will never work, it's not this, it's not that well, it does, and you know, it's more about reassurance in that instance.
Speaker #1
I think that gives us a good idea of how the technology can be used and how you position yourself as well as the company, Platinum, I mean, as a member of Universal Automation Notorious. And I think that's the end of our... Q&A session. So I thank you all for being there, for seeing that. You see the contact details of Stephen, which are down on the screen. Stephen, I really thank you for sharing with us your experience with the Tx499, with the technology of universalautomation.org, and I hope that it will help the community to understand more what universalautomation.org is as a non-profit associations. I take the opportunity to say that we are a non-profit association we are acting globally and we are open for for new new joiners so new joiner our organization uh you could be user of automation you could be vendor information you could be working more in the academics or being an institute link to automation we welcome all of you so don't hesitate to to get back to us contact us on our linkedin page and uh we'll get back to you to uh for maybe a small meeting or uh or directly to to have you subscribing to the associations so thank you all again and i wish you a very nice end of the day bye thanks bye

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