Kicking off the Foxboro & Triconex Global Client Conference in San Antonio this week, Peter Martin, vice president and Invensys Fellow, referenced Foxboro’s first distributed control system (DCS) as a “revolutionary approach to control.” That was 1987. Today’s industrial climate calls for more “evolutionary innovation,” Martin said.

And so Invensys has dubbed its latest-generation process automation system—launched today at the conference—Foxboro Evo. And the execs here are all atwitter about the advances designed to improve operational insight and integrity.

Foxboro Evo is a “real advancement in technologies and capabilities,” said Gary Freburger, president of the systems business for Invensys. “It’s the next generation in our control system, and a platform for the age of evolution in our systems.”

Based on a high-speed, fault-tolerant and cybersecure hardware platform, the process automation system has evolved directly from the Foxboro I/A Series and Triconex safety system. The system extends this approach through a component object-based platform, which can undergo major upgrades without halting operations.

“We needed to upgrade the vast majority of our DCS, but like most sites, we didn't have the luxury of a site-wide shutdown to make a full change possible,” said Michael McKenzie, DCS specialist for BP in Brisbane, Australia. “We were facing a substantial obsolescence issue, which we had ranked as a significant risk to ongoing operations, so we needed a solution that would allow us to upgrade components as we needed them, without sacrificing functionality or usability for operators.”

Because users can upgrade at their own pace, the Foxboro Evo system delivers the a lower total cost of automation with a high return on assets. BP’s Brisbane location, for example, put its current process control in around 1998. The switch to an updated system should work seamlessly, McKenzie said. “We’re able to choose our battles when we want to or need to,” he added. “There’s not an incentive to upgrade some of those yet.”

The Foxboro Evo system includes a new high-speed controller, field device management tools, a maintenance response center, an enterprise historian, 1-n redundancy and cybersecurity hardening. The system provides visibility into historical, real-time and predictive operating information to help drive production efficiency.

With its introduction of Evo, Invensys emphasizes the role it plays throughout the operations—improving not only operator visibility, but also other functions. “It really will change everyone; every function in your operation,” Freburger said, pointing to reduced risk, cost and time throughout the organization.

Freburger pointed to an increasingly inexperienced, aging and changing workforce. The Evo advances help various functions do more with less:

• Operators gain a more complete, real-time view of plant activity via an updated high-performance, mobile-accessible HMI.
• System and process engineers can reduce their workloads, protect schedule integrity and reduce risk via more intuitive design and troubleshooting features, virtualization and other flexible technology.
• Safety and security personnel benefit from a coupling of control and safety, which enables sharing of operational information while keeping the safety system functionally isolated, plus state-of-the-art cybersecurity.
• Maintenance technicians enjoy lower meantime between repairs via real-time device alerts and analytics, alarm triage, performance monitoring and other benefits.

That said, the process operator’s still the most important person in our world, said Chris Lyden, senior vice president of business development for the Software and Industrial Automation division of Invensys, during a press luncheon. “There are a lot of clients we serve…but when it comes to process operators, there are hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. They need absolute clarity of every action they’re supposed to take. Foxboro Evo is really focused on how they can do that better.”

Current Foxboro I/A Series DCS users can migrate to the Foxboro Evo system with little or no downtime, depending on which version they are running. Users of competing process automation systems, whose wiring terminations are still functional, can migrate to the Foxboro Evo system without ripping and replacing infrastructure, significantly reducing costs and downtime.

“We will not leave existing customers behind,” Freburger said. “We will continue to support you to take advantage of new technologies.”

This is a continuation of Invensys’ ongoing “future proofing” policy, Lyden noted. “Existing I/A systems are a complete subset of Foxboro Evo,” he said. “Everything that’s in I/A today works with Foxboro Evo too.”