Schneider Electric, one of the leading providers of power, control, and automation solutions for infrastructure projects in several sectors including WWW (water and wastewater), MMM (mining, minerals and metals), and oil and gas, continues to impress with useful innovations.

Established nearly 176 years ago, it has since grown its footprint to over 100 countries. Within Saudi Arabia itself, Schneider Electric’s manufacturing operation continues to be an important production hub for the Middle East region.

Its collaborative and integrated automation architecture for industrial and infrastructure customers, PlantStruxure, brings together telemetry, PLC/Scada and distributed control system (DCS) offerings with complete lifecycle services to help make Industrial operations highly efficient. From initial design to modernisation, PlantStruxure transparently connects control, operation and enterprise levels of one’s business.

Schneider Electric has announced Process Expert System (PES), integrating the functionalities of Schneider Electric’s PlantStruxure collaborative architecture with StruxureWare Process Expert, a single software environment that integrates control applications, supervision and field devices to configure an entire control system. PlantStruxure allows industrial companies to meet automation needs while optimising operations and energy management by connecting the control, operation, and enterprise levels within a business.

PlantStruxure architecture is Schneider Electric’s collaborative and integrated architecture, built on best-in- lass products and lifecycle services, from initial design to modernisation.

PlantStruxure PES brings together the best of programmable automation controllers (PAC) and DCS to form an innovative energy-aware process automation system that meets the demands of today’s production facilities while delivering on growing energy management requirements. The system combines energy and process data in one platform, providing a consistent, real-time control and operational interface. PES delivers data that drives timely and accurate decision-making to reduce energy consumption and increase process efficiency.

The common challenges of an industrial process automation and control system are:

• Improve plant performance and profitability
• Optimise energy use and improve sustainability
• Reduce downtime
• Increase operator efficiency
• Increase engineering and maintenance efficiency

Tight integration of the system within the PlantStruxure PES ensures efficiency from design engineering through to operation – process engineers can develop the configuration faster and accurately, plant operators have all the data at their fingertips for better insight to optimise the process, and maintenance teams can diagnose and solve problems faster to avoid and reduce the downtime of the facility.

PLANTSTRUXURE PES ADVANTAGES
The company highlights that PlantStruxure PES helps make the right decisions at the right time, which leads to increased uptime for the whole plant and directly impacts the bottomline. It delivers superior value throughout the lifecycle of the plant by:

• Ethernet-based, energy-aware architectures for simplicity and performance.
• Powerful and scalable controller platform to suit the requirements of complex applications.
• Single environment for engineering, operation and maintenance to remove the need use multiple software tools and environments.
• Open and extensible objects and object libraries to simplify engineering and maintenance and deliver standardisation across the plant.

StruxureWare Process Expert, the software component of PES, leverages a single database to enable users to directly interface with a single process element, such as a pump, during runtime operations with a single click. This integration delivers significant value through streamlined operations. The software also allows object libraries built for StruxureWare Process Expert to be easily modified, streamlined and customised for individual process and users.

OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS
Unlike the traditional DCS system, where it takes openness and flexibility in the communication protocols supported, as well as the application libraries, and integration of energy management libraries and control objects, Plantstruxure PES overcomes these limitations by providing:

• Integration of process and energy information in a single environment
• Single data entry for the configuration of control and supervision functionality
• Open and extensible object libraries that encompass both visualisation and control functions
• Incremental project changes and updates
• Integrated management of controllers, I/O, process and energy devices
• Support for open technology and flexible architectures to the device and IO level

APPLICATIONS IN PROJECTS
Plantstruxure PES is being used already for different strategic projects worldwide to provide fully reliable and integrated process automation solutions, such as the Swellfun White Spirit Food and Beverage Plant in China, the Vargeme Grande Mining Plant in Brazil, the Oropesa Water Desalination Plant in Spain and the Kassinga Iron Ore Plant in South Africa.

Schneider Electric is based in Paris. The Hive, the company’s headquarters building, is the first building in the world to be certified “outstanding” (six stars) under the Breeam framework. Breeam stands for the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method.