Honeywell Unveils New Engineering Solution for Industrial Control Systems

In a recent announcement, Honeywell unveiled its Experion PKS Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), what it’s calling a fundamentally new approach to engineering and maintaining industrial control systems. This is an evolution of the company’s flagship Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS).

Experion PKS HIVE uses Honeywell’s LEAP project execution principles, software and networking to unchain control applications from physical equipment, and controllers from physical IO. This is designed to enable control systems to be engineered and implemented in less time, at lower cost and risk, and with simpler, modular builds. The solution also shifts day-to-day management of servers to a centralized data center, where experts and established protocols mitigate cybersecurity risk, with the goal of allowing plant engineers to focus more proactively on optimization of their control systems.

“ARC market research shows that solutions like Honeywell Experion PKS HIVE address key issues for customers around project risk and ultimately project cost,” said Mark Sen Gupta, research director, ARC Advisory Group. “A more fascinating aspect is the greater flexibility in control architecture design and implementation allowing for a more optimal use of physical and computing control system assets.”

Experion PKS HIVE incorporates three elements – IT HIVE, IO HIVE and Control HIVE – which can be used individually or collectively, in tandem with customers’ existing systems and infrastructure:

• Experion PKS IT HIVE centralizes up to 80% of the IT infrastructure traditionally used in project engineering to lower project delivery and lifecycle costs, better leverage skills, and drive consistent physical and cybersecurity management across an enterprise.
• Experion PKS IO HIVE provides flexible IO and control distribution enabling the control system to become a natural extension of process equipment and to facilitate modular and parallel project execution.
• Experion PKS Control HIVE uniquely applies control containers to provide flexibility and standardization of control hardware platform, control location, and control engineering. With multiple physically controllers operating as part of a Experion PKS Control HIVE, control engineering is dramatically simplified through automated load balancing.

“In developing Experion PKS HIVE, Honeywell worked closely with customers across the chemical, refining and oil and gas industries,” said Jason Urso, CTO, Honeywell Process Solutions. “Many of these organizations want a more efficient approach to control system engineering, yet one that can be adopted incrementally and used interchangeably with their existing systems and infrastructure. Experion PKS HIVE provides these benefits and is truly a distributed control as it applies and geographically distributes technology to where it is needed.”