with their own internally developed products to stitch together patchwork integrated control system offerings.

These products work, but adapting them to a particular customer’s needs, and modifying them as those needs evolve is difficult, due mostly to the difficulty of trying to force often incompatible bottom-level components to work together. The resulting architectures are complex, data communications paths tend to be torturous, and visibility through the enterprise is murky at best. The problem is that developing systems from the outside in—bringing together different components developed by different teams for different purposes, then trying to stitch them together by making ad hoc interfaces—cannot produce an efficient industrial automation system.

Total integration requires integrating with a core intelligence from the inside out.
The solution is to start with a central core system that provides basic resources needed by nearly all enterprises, and dock additional resources onto that core to provide the customization needed to fit the resulting system exactly to the individual customer's needs. This is the inside-out development process Siemens Energy and Automation used to create its Totally Integrated Automation system. TIA starts with a core, which is designed and tested and is used for all products. Products work together from the inside-out instead of just being patched together. Rather than bridging dissimilar islands of automation, TIA automation just naturally fits together.

Siemens system engineers applied the tried-and-true strategy of designing from the top down and implementing from the bottom up when developing TIA. That is, they started by working out the system’s modular architecture and setting standards for modules, including quality, performance, and interface protocols. This architecture must apply to both software and hardware modules to allow integrating truly seamless systems. Modules were developed from the bottom up to meet TIA standards. The result is total integration. This TIA characteristic helps in two ways: it simplifies the initial system-integration process; and it makes later upgrading easier to accomplish.

Consistent standards, top to bottom

For control system integration to be most effective, automation standards and practices should be consistent from the top plant-wide levels right down to the bottom control loop in each machine. This is, of course, difficult to achieve when patching together islands of automation.

TIA capitalizes on Siemens history of quality automation products. Comprising over 100,000 models, Siemens’ TIA products have been proven over 15 years in the field. These resources combine to make implementing a manufacturing facility’s TIA infrastructure as straightforward as possible. System integrators can “keep eyes on the prize” and concentrate on producing an infrastructure tailored for the individual facility’s needs, rather than on overcoming available products’ incompatibilities and limitations found in conventional systems.

TIA’s core resources fall under the headings of Engineering, Communication, Diagnostics, Safety, Security, and Ruggedness. TIA presents an integrated engineering environment based on international, multi-vendor standards with flexible options for combination, such as PROFIBUS (the world’s leading fieldbus), PROFINET (the open Industrial Ethernet Standard), AS-Interface, etc. The single engineering environment allows for engineering a complete system including controllers, HMIs, drives, networking, and distributed I/O. TIA offers diagnostic functions for quick detection and efficient clearing of possible faults, promoting greater system availability. Compared to conventional safety technology, the integrated safety solution saves considerable cabling overhead and space, and greatly reduces installation and commissioning time. Scalable IT security mechanisms, including access protection, user administration, firewall, virtual private network (VPN) and other elements, offer the necessary security for production and data with minimal administrative expense. A system can only be regarded as high quality if every individual component offers quality and ruggedness where needed. All components, from connectors at the field level to industry-standard PCs at the operations level, are resilient.

TIA is the basis for consistent automation of your entire production line, from incoming materials to outgoing products. This end-to-end integration makes an essential contribution to the company-wide optimization of production processes in both discrete and process industries. Integration in engineering, communication, and data management offers a wealth of advantages at every stage of the life cycle, from the first planning steps through installation and commissioning, operation and maintenance, to subsequent expansions and modernizations.

Adopting Totally Integrated Automation is an investment in maximum engineering efficiency yielding an enormous potential for saving time and money.