MatrikonOPC User Group - Houston Session Abstracts

The MatrikonOPC User Group Conference has world-speakers and experts presenting this year. Below is a brief overview of their session abstracts and biographies. Additional information will be added as sessions are confirmed.

Dave Bernero

OPC and Hospital Products – A Pharmaceutical Case Study
Discover how OPC is being used at Hospira to collect critical sterilization parameters during the manufacturing of lifesaving I.V. solutions. The presentation focuses on Hospira’s decision to replace an aging data collection system with an updated, OPC based solution along with the challenges and obstacles faced in the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry.

John Bridges

Progress in Open Standards-Based Operations & Maintenance Interoperability
The push is on to drive awareness and adoption of open standards, something that is growing steadily. Hear what technology initiatives are underway to help bring Operations and Maintenance standards into the mainstream manufacturing community with emphasis on how standards are being used in collaboration strategies to drive operational excellence.

Tom Burke

Future of Real-Time Architecture
OPC-UA (Unified Architecture) extends the highly successful OPC communication protocol, enabling data acquisition and information modeling/communication between the plant floor and the enterprise.

Attendees at this session will learn the features and functions of this innovative new technology, and how the architecture provides real-time enterprise performance management driving bottom-line value to manufacturing companies.

You will walk away with a detailed understanding of the OPC Foundation Unified Architecture aka secure reliable multi-vendor interoperability, and how OPC Unified Architecture unifies the exiting installed base of OPC products into a service-oriented architecture.

Fred Cohn

Combination of 2 standards: Modbus and OPC
OPC is the industry standard method for SCADA and information systems to access plant floor information. OPC's Client/Server architecture fits perfectly in the PC environments hosting SCADA systems. In order for these OPC Servers to acquire the data from the plant floor, a simple, cost-effective, open protocol is needed that is consistent with the architectures and cost targets of industrial devices. Modbus protocol, originally developed for serial device communications, has successfully migrated to industrial Ethernet architectures due to its simplicity, openness, and scalability. Modbus, therefore, complements perfectly the OPC architecture by allowing OPC Servers to easily and efficiently communicate to a full range of end devices found in industrial applications such as PLCs, drives, motor control, and I/O.

Bill Finn

Application of Turbine in Monitoring and Controls - OPC in Action
Santee Cooper is the 4th largest public power generation company in North America and has over 2 million customers in South Carolina. Santee Cooper has 6 different power generation facilities made up of hydro, coal, nuclear, and gas. They have an extensive data collection system primarily at their generating stations to ensure that they consistently receive reliable, secure, auditable data for monitoring and control. The data collection system is based entirely upon OPC technology. Some examples of the Performance Services Group project include real time data collection and display for plant performance monitoring of:

William graduated from Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio with a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineer and is a Professional Engineer in the South Carolina. William has worked for the US Navy as a Federal Employee engineer, concentrating on data communications.

Michael Godfrey

Using OPC for Digital Video Surveillance and Intrusion Detection

Andrew Higginbotham & David Tappen

Leveraging OPC Standards Based Connectivity to Build a Foundation
Washington Gas needed to upgrade an antiquated analog telemeter system into a modern wireless industrial standards based system to improve operating efficiencies. They chose to integrate OPC standards based connectivity into their existing system to afford them a new level of data exchange, reduced maintenance costs and improve plant safety.

David Tappen
David came to Washington Gas in October 2003, he is in the Automation & Controls group, focusing on PLC and Scada system design, installation, programming, and support. His previous experience was managing a large iFix installation at a semiconductor facility. Dave earned a BSEE from Rensselaer Poly Technic Institute in 1994.

Rick Kaun

Working with Poor Implementation of Cyber Security
In today's competitive market, manufacturing and operations companies must improve the timeliness and effectiveness of their production decisions to stay competitive. This often involves the integration of real-time production systems with business applications using OPC to streamline the flow of information. However, security issues with Windows & Internet-connected business networks have caused significant reliability issues for operations systems. Some of the primary causes of lost production leading to financial loss are incorrectly configured firewalls, viruses and un-installed or outdated system patches. To effectively address security; people, processes and technology must be considered. This presentation attempts to address security challenges by identifying vulnerabilities, applying pacesetter best-practices and sharing experiences and solutions.

Darek Kominek

Introduction to OPC
This vendor independent presentation provides a quick introductory overview to OPC Technology. The Introduction to OPC Session explains the vision of OPC, examines a case study, and provides more information about the various OPC specifications. After this presentation you will understand the basics of OPC and the knowledge required to begin integrating OPC into your current system.

Sean Leonard

OPC – From Today and Into the Future
To say that OPC is widely adopted is an understatement. When companies like yours demand OPC as the standard for interfacing with any type of industrial system it sends a clear message: OPC implementations are mature and adoption is universal. What are the next problems that OPC will solve in our organizations?

Harry McKinley

OPC Integration Testing for New Generation DCS Platforms
Being an early adopter of new release technology certainly brings some risks with it. For a power station DCS modernization project, these risks came from multiple sources. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the considerations as an early Honeywell R300 adopter, the approach to subsystem OPC integration to a Honeywell DCS, the testing processes engaged to mitigate integration software risks associated with a new DCS platform, and a summary of the results of our testing.

David Mobley

Laboratory Results to Any System – OPC Eliminates Custom Interfaces
In today’s environment of Global Enterprise Resource Planning and highly sophisticated process modeling systems, making laboratory results available in a timely manner is critical for success. Traditionally interfaces to process control systems, data historians, and on line analyzers require specialized applications to navigate their proprietary protocols. OPC eliminates these custom interfaces.

Dick Morley

Future of Technology: Three & Ten Year Vision
The future of technology -- a dangerous journey which we cannot predict any better than the weather, but doing nothing is worse. Take a trip into the future using the lessons of the past. The talk will be controversial and stimulating. Dick suggests that you have two cups of coffee before sitting down. Enjoy.

Scott Morse

Using OPC in Discrete Manufacturing
OPC has been used for years in the Process Control environment but has only recently been applied to Discrete Manufacturing. This discussion will highlight the similarities and differences between the Process Control and Discrete Manufacturing environments outline situations where OPC can be used in Discrete Manufacturing, and the successes and pitfalls discovered when OPC was applied in real-world Discrete Manufacturing environments.

When using OPC as the backbone, it is possible to use one system and coordinated software packages to provide a number of business solutions with lower costs and easier start up than stand-alone proprietary software and hardware solutions. Specific areas to be addressed include:

Karim Moti

Leveraging OPC A&E Across the Enterprise
Many companies use OPC A&E to feed their HMI systems and alert operators. But OPC A&E can be used across the enterprise to help with many other initiatives. Find out how this technology can help improve Operator Effectiveness, optimize Maintenance work orders, help with bad instrument identification, and much more.

Eric Murphy

OPC In Mission Critical Applications
OPC can be used reliably and effectively in mission-critical applications. This includes any operation that cannot tolerate intervention, compromise or shutdown during the performance of its critical function. With the proper architecture, any standard OPC solution can be made robust enough to meet these demands.

Ramifications of Improperly Set-up Security
Is your OPC security implemented properly? Providing secure communications is a balance of security and interoperability. How an OPC solution is architected and implemented has significant impact on the usability of a system, and serious ramifications if not done correctly.

Bob Ofenstein

Bridging BACnet and OPC for Building Automation Control
This presentation describes the current state of the BACnet protocol and how OPC and BACnet compliment each other in real world applications. Architectural and conceptual differences between the two standards will be highlighted together with how these are handled in a BACnet OPC Server. Cases involving a large number of BACnet points will be discussed. Cimetrics and MatrikonOPC will be working together on the development of the OPC Server for Bacnet. Look forward to the release of the product in the coming year.

Dane Overfield

Using OPC as a Process Calculation Platform
There are multiple platform choices for implementing process calculations, ranging from the DCS, PLC5, SCADA, Historians, and Spreadsheets. Process Calculations based on OPC (custom code or products such as OCPcalc) provide many advantages including - calculations which read from and write to multiple data sources — vendor neutrality - ease of maintenance - ease of creation (with the right tools) - decreased development time.

Jim Pinto

The Importance of Using Standards
The definition of a "standard" is simple: operating specifications that everybody follows. Standards provide openness and interoperability between products from different vendors.

OPC is open connectivity in industrial automation and enterprise systems that support industry. Interoperability is assured through the creation and maintenance of open standards specifications.

Joe Scalia

Implementation Considerations for Safety Systems Integration with DCS
DCS communications integration utilizing OPC has become more widespread in the process industries. Triconex and Matrikon have pioneered the use of OPC for communications integration. There are design and implementation considerations that have been discovered which help make Safety Systems to DCS communications fault tolerant, available and more secure.

Arun Veeramani

Adding Advanced Measurements through OPC
Plants are optimizing by adding new and high speed measurements to improve the uptime and yield of existing automation systems. OPC acts as the critical link to connect these legacy controllers to next generation hardware. In this session, you will learn about the different measurement types, their application areas and prime opportunities for plant optimization.

Randy Warren

Using OPC to Coordinate Supervisory Control of Equipment Units
TruLink™ is a new proposed standard that is designed to allow individual units to acquire, control and exchange data with each other in a way that dramatically reduces the integration engineering effort traditionally associated with implementing other communication standards such as serial communication standards or even OPC alone. This standard takes advantage of OPC and XML to build a structure that allows units to link together without having to understand how the unit operates below the TruLink™ Layer.

Because XML can be defined with standard and optional components the mandatory data parameters required to provide the standard base functionality can be described and verified to ensure that all TruLink™ approved units will be able to connect to each other. Custom data parameters unique to each unit will also be able to be included in the XML definition to allow users to access custom features or data.

OPC is open connectivity in industrial automation and enterprise systems that support industry. Interoperability is assured through the creation and maintenance of open standards specifications.

Scott Williams

Achieve a High Availability SCADA System
Matrikon's OPC Redundancy Broker has enabled Enbridge Energy to achieve its goal of highly available data collection while also maintaining geographically redundant data centers. Over the past several years, Enbridge has moved from using field personnel as its contingency for communications failure to automatic failover and notification. From a single proprietary polling server to multiple OPC servers, from a single data center to two redundant, geographically separated data centers. To achieve this transition, Enbridge has implemented redundancy at the OPC communication level using Matrikon's OPC Redundancy Broker software. In addition to redundancy, the OPC Redundancy Broker also abstracts the quantity and types of OPC servers that provide data to the SCADA system. The result is a straightforward OPC communications implementation with configurable redundancy. The OPC Redundancy Broker provides fault tolerance without requiring complicated scripting inside the SCADA software. By utilizing the OPC Redundancy Broker, Enbridge was able to complete its redundancy scheme using off the shelf software and hardware and minimizing custom development and configuration.

Rick Zabel

Resources to Stay Connected & Improve Productivity
There’s no question that the Internet offers a wealth of information. The challenge is finding and then understanding the value of various information channels and tools available online. This session will explore a few online features like RSS, Blogs, Discussion Forums, Search Mechanisms and Webcasts that you can use to stay connected and ultimately improve your productivity.