Mantenmiento Y Confiabilidad Sobre La Automatizacion

Automation Insider: Maintenance and Reliability Meet Automation

Welcome to this new bi-monthly column focusing on how automation impacts maintenance and reliability. I’ve been Editor-in-Chiefof Automation World magazine since it started in 2003. Prior to that, I had a career in manufacturing. I’ve known the team at Maintenance Technology for many years and have spoken twice at MARTS. This is awelcome opportunity to share my knowledge and passion for automation with another set of readers. 
Digital networks have had an almost accidental benefit for maintenance. Initially touting reducedwiring as the advantage, almost immediately the benefits of built-in diagnostics proved to be far greater than any wiring reduction.
Foundation Fieldbus, with its ability to interface with mostasset-management applications, is slowly gaining traction in the process industries. Over the past year, several enormous new plants in Asia have specified this network. Many of us have had two questionsregarding the direction of the Foundation Fieldbus specification. The first is how the network organization will use its High Speed Ethernet (HSE) protocol. The second concerns how the various wirelesstechnologies will play in the network.
Those questions found answers on December 1, 2011, in Baytown, TX, at a Fieldbus Foundation Media Day. The overall technology announced has been dubbed “RemoteOperations Management” (ROM). The essential components of the platform will, among other things, provide a more powerful SCADA experience as well as further empower the mobile worker. They will havethe ability to handle greater point-count Remote I/O and be able to incorporate various wireless standards, including ISA 100.11a of the International Society of Automation and WirelessHart of the HartCommunication Foundation.
ROM topology includes a ROM device that is essentially a gateway for  communicating to existing Foundation Fieldbus H1 networks, as well as wired Hart and the two...