Honeywell User Group: The Fieldbus Perspective

I just returned from what was a very successful Honeywell Users Group Americas conference, with about 600 end user customers and total of around 1,000 attendees if you count Honeywell people and their partner companies. You didn’t have to look far to see the FOUNDATION Fieldbus content at the show. Highlights included Joe Serafin’s presentation on Honeywell Fieldbus Differentiators on Wednesday afternoon. Right after Joe presented I got to deliver my presentation on the current state and roadmap of the Fieldbus Foundation and FOUNDATION Technology. There were also some new fieldbus related product introductions, including a new version of Honeywell’s Asset Manager PKS, a new Honeywell Fieldbus Interface Module that is capable of handling up to eight H1 links, and the new Pepperl+Fuchs Advanced Diagnostics Module, which is seamlessly embedded in the Experion PKS process automation system. We also saw fieldbus mentioned in some of the end user presentations. Gordon Staub of global engineering firm WorleyParsons talked about some of the challenges of successful project execution in a large installation in the Canadian oil sands that included 3,000 FOUNDATION Fieldbus devices. You can read more about Gordon’s presentation at the HUG 2011 Live Site. As I mentioned in my previous post about HUG, Honeywell has several partners under their PKS Advantage program, and these were all in attendance. Many of these partners offer products that complement Honeywell’s fieldbus solutions, including Flowserve, Masoneilan Dresser, Metso, MTL, Phoenix Contact, R Stahl, and Turck. In addition to offering a registered integrated host and 16 registered devices, Honeywell also has its own on site interoperability testing lab in Bangalore and you can get a list of devices tested by Honeywell here. It’s fairly extensive.