How Integrated SIS Can Boost Efficiency

By Liz Bahl Prosak, Commercial Portfolio Manager, and Kris Dornan, Marketing Manager for Large Controllers, Rockwell Automation

Equipment that’s built on a common automation architecture delivers benefits across its life span. By reducing the number of disparate technologies and interfaces, the equipment can be more quickly and easily developed, using fewer tools and less specialized knowledge. And it can simplify the jobs of everyone who interacts with it in a production environment.

Now, one more disparate technology can be folded into the automation architecture with the introduction of integrated safety instrumented systems (SISs).

Integrated SIS is built on the same platform as the base process control system (BPCS). This allows the two systems to be designed, implemented, operated and maintained together as part of a common architecture.

For OEMs, integrated SIS can simplify and accelerate projects that require process safety or hybrid process and machine safety. And it can help them better differentiate their equipment from the competition by giving users simplified systems, better insights and more efficient maintenance.

Decreased Engineering Time and Costs

For decades, the different control disciplines used in production environments — such as discrete, batch, process and motion — have been converging into a common integrated architecture. However, because the SIS historically has been built on a separate platform and used different logic, it has remained outside this architecture and operating in isolation.

By bringing the SIS onto the same platform as the BPCS, and thus into the common architecture, an integrated SIS simplifies how equipment is developed and deployed.

Now, engineers don’t need to learn and use two different sets of tools for process and safety control. Instead, they can program and configure the SIS and BPCS together, using a common toolset and single knowledgebase.

The productivity-enhancing features in those toolsets — which until now could only be used on the common automation architecture — now also can be unleashed on the SIS.

For example, some design and configuration tools allow for multi-user collaboration, so engineers with different skillsets and in different locations can work on a project simultaneously.

In addition, some tools use disruptive technology such as AI to help answer engineers’ questions and troubleshoot errors. Extending these features to SIS programming and configuration can help engineers work more efficiently.

Additionally, developing a common human-machine interfact (HMI) display for safety and process control can be greatly eased in a common architecture. Engineers no longer need to map data from disparate systems that use different logic. Instead, they can use SIS and BPCS data that come from the same platform and are based on a common logic to more easily and intuitively create a display.

Integrated SIS solutions also can modernize how engineers approach process safety to deliver further time and cost savings in projects.

For example, traditional SIS solutions have required engineers to write custom add-on instructions to achieve SIL 2. But recently introduced integrated SIS solutions use the latest control and I/O technology and are engineered to achieve SIL 2 almost out of the box. Rather than writing custom code, engineers can now simply check some boxes for their safety configurations.

Engineers can also take advantage of modern control system capabilities available in integrated SIS solutions. Granular safety signatures, for example, compartmentalize safety functions to shorten SIS validation and testing times.