Honeywell Unveils New Approach to Engineering Industrial Control Systems

Honeywell unveiled Experion PKS Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), 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 reportedly enables control systems to be engineered and implemented in less time, at lower cost and risk, and with simpler, modular builds.  The solution also transforms the way control systems are maintained over their lifecycle, shifting day-to-day management of servers to a centralized data center, where experts and established protocols mitigate cybersecurity risk, allowing plant engineers to focus more proactively on optimization of their control systems.

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. 

Experion PKS HIVE shifts IO to the field and makes it fully accessible to any controller, taking individual physical controllers and distributing the load so that they appear as a single controller to eliminate complexity.  The solution distributes IT compute from onsite to offsite providing a seamless operations experience. 

The Experion PKS IT HIVE and IO HIVE can be ordered now, with deliveries beginning Q1 2020.  Experion PKS Control HIVE will be available in the second half of 2020.

Mark Sen Gupta, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “ARC market research shows that solutions like Honeywell Experion PKS HIVE address key issues for customers around project risk and ultimately project cost.  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.”