[font=Arial] Realizing the Full Potential of Wireless In the current global economic climate, manufacturing facilities are being continually pushed to grow the efficiency and profitability of their processes. The incentives to improve, automate and extend the enterprise apply to everything from operations to maintenance and are rooted in virtually every aspect of the manufacturing process. For many plants, the low-hanging fruit for automation initiatives has long since been harvested, leaving the difficult or costly projects that lack financial justification or sufficient operational benefit to move forward. The emergence of industrial wireless technologies and standards radically changes the economics of these operational investments creating new opportunities to improve the efficiency, safety, security, and productivity of your plant. Wireless Technologies at Work One doesn’t have to look far to see that major automation vendors are increasingly integrating wireless technologies into their products to sow the seeds for this next generation of plant automation. Going wireless is seen as a way to cost effectively add more monitoring capabilities and points of measurement, enhance workforce mobility, improve safety and security, and drive more efficient utilization of assets, raw materials and energy. However, for wireless to work in these often difficult and changing environments the technologies must deliver reliable performance, ease of use and cost effectiveness. Although wireless is heralded as the next big thing in automation, it certainly isn’t new. The move to use wireless technology to reduce costs and improve efficiency has been underway for some time in manufacturing organizations such as in the warehouse for asset tracking, materials handling, and supply chain management and at the points of entry for security and access control. Industrial facilities have also been using wireless as part of SCADA systems, telemetry and microwave communications for decades, in places ranging from waste water treatment facilities to offshore oil platforms. What has changed is the emergence of products, applications and standards to address the specific challenges for using wireless in large manufacturing facilities. By extending the range and lowering the costs of plant and process network communications, this new generation of wireless network technology offers a tremendous opportunity to realize significant improvements in the overall efficiency of the plant. Wireless monitoring sensors can enable better, more timely data into your control system, predictive maintenance or asset management application. Operators in the field are now able to see the control system and review standard operating conditions, procedures, and corrective actions in real-time as they make field adjustments. Security departments are using wireless as a means to improve security and achieve timely compliance with increasing regulations by wirelessly adding video monitoring, along with improved access control and intrusion detection. Other technologies and applications such as voice over wireless communications and asset tracking use wireless to enable productivity gains that have already been realized in other industries such as healthcare and transportation. In some cases these benefits were simply too costly to achieve by running wires, while in others they simply couldn’t be done without wireless networks. Going forward the challenge is to insure that the best of breed industrial wireless solutions are secure, scalable and simple to operate. Overcoming that challenge requires more than just standards and single source vendors. Choosing the Right Wireless Technology As the list of wireless applications grows, so do the numbers of wireless devices and systems that support these applications, adding complexity that arises from using multiple wireless technologies to address the each applications’ requirements coverage, latency and throughput. Most of these systems have been designed to use unlicensed frequencies, which are shared across the different technologies and applications. The sharing of these frequencies is made easier by the emergence of robust standards for communications, but standards alone are not enough. Standards assure the proper function of the systems with a given set of cost/performance characteristics, and a basis for interoperability - but no single wireless technology or standard is capable of being the single solution for every application. Standards-based technologies like WiFi （IEEE 802.11） have been hardened for mobile workers to take ruggedized tablet PCs and PDAs into the plant while other radios like those based on IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth that are optimized to support wireless sensor networks are being embedded into industrial instrumentation as currently being defined by the ISA 100. In addition, robust long-range, high bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX （IEEE 802.16） have been ruggedized for industrial environments and applications. This diversity of cost/performance trade offs among these and the dozens of other available industrialized wireless networking technologies dictates that users choose the most effective technology and devices for a given application. There is not a “one-size-fits-all” wireless networking technology that adequately supports the diverse and demanding requirements of industrial applications and environments. The laws of physics dictate that is extremely unlikely that there will be such a powerfully flexible wireless technology anytime in our future. Managing an Invisible Asset So what? There is an extremely important asset that you own and control. However, if you don’t manage this asset effectively, it could turn into your greatest liability. This asset is your airwaves – the radiofrequency spectrum that is available to you in and around your facility. Imagine two to three years from now when you have hundreds or even thousands of wireless devices in your plant from dozens of vendors. Just like your wired networks today, without the right tools for managing the secure, effective coexistence of your airwaves, the wireless communications networks will become unreliable, slow, and potentially will create unintended security vulnerabilities. In addition, the choices you make today, may limit your options in the future as new wireless technologies become available. How do you both avoid this looming wireless logjam and future-proof your wireless networks? Wireless Deployment Options: Organic or Engineered The first and easiest option is just allow wireless systems to be deployed and grow in an organic manner – adding wireless devices and their unique supporting infrastructure one application at a time with each new point solution – and hope that somehow all of these systems will work together over time. No matter what the application, the wireless option will almost always be just as effective and cost much less to implement and manage. This allows you to cost-effectively solve the immediate problem, check the box, and move on to the next. Now do that again three or four times and you have saved yourself money and addressed several operational issues – but what kind of problems have you created for yourself in the airwaves – and what happens when you add the next application? Without any ability to manage the wireless spectrum and how it is utilized across wireless systems and applications – there is no way to ensure the security, performance and reliability of your wireless applications. At some point, your wireless networks will bump into each other and that is a collision you want to avoid. On way to avoid the collision is to take an engineered approach. This is where you and your operational team invest in a design and plan on how you will leverage and deploy wireless systems to address your current critical needs and potential needs in the future. This takes an investment of time and a crossfunctional commitment from the operational team to be successful. But if you believe, as many do, that wireless technologies are going to become a growing part of your operations, then this is an investment worth making. Single Vendor or Best-of-Breed? Taking the engineered approach however, leaves you with another decision. Should you invest in a pre-integrated wireless system from a single vendor or buy best of breed solutions that better address the specific requirements of each of your applications? Choosing all of your wireless networking applications from a single vendor gives you the advantage of an engineered system that is designed to integrate various wireless technologies into a single seamless system. This lets you take advantage of shared wireless infrastructure and achieve economies of both scale and scope. Unfortunately, this also locks you into a limited set of lowest-common-denominator proprietary “standards” that will leave you vulnerable to being held hostage by a single vendor. As new applications emerge and wireless technologies evolve, your dependence on a single vendor will limit your options, lock you into the preferences of a single vendor, and hold you back while your competitors move forward. Your other option is to review the unique needs of your operations, facilities, and desired applications and choose the best wireless technology for you. This best-of-breed approach will have a better chance of delivering the performance and reliability you require. But each best-of-breed point solution you deploy will demand its own infrastructure and management system – requiring an investment in technology and manpower. Each point-solution wireless technology and application will also require its own wireless infrastructure, network management, and security. There will be no re-use of a common infrastructure. Each wireless application will be much more expensive to deploy and manage – making it difficult to establish a positive return on your investment in any single wireless technology or application. Another consideration to consider is the future of wireless technology. It is obvious that wireless technologies are not standing still. There will be new wireless technologies, tools, devices and applications becoming available over the next decade. Locking yourself into a single vendor or an inflexible dedicated network won’t let you easily take advantage of new technologies as they become available. The answer is to have a single shared wireless network that allows “plug and play” interoperability, management, and security of any wireless devices and applications – regardless of their radio frequency, protocol, or application. A truly open wireless infrastructure will allow you to choose exactly the right wireless device and application for your plant. In addition, because there is no single wireless network technology, application or vendor capable of delivering the full range of industrial wireless products and applications, you will want to manage the cost of ownership of a multi-application, multi-vendor infrastructure. Achieving a greater degree of application flexibility and cost certainty requires an engineered approach that creates a network of systems based on open standards, best practices and vendor neutrality across applications. Apprion’s ION System Apprion specifically developed its ION System to enable process manufacturers to cost-effectively deploy the best possible wireless applications for your plant. This vendor-neutral approach to industrial application implementation insures that plant operations managers are able to cost effectively deploy the best wireless solution for any given application. As the only provider of multi-vendor, multi-standard, multi-frequency wireless technology in a unified architecture, Apprion is helping companies filter through the growing noise around industrial wireless products and move forward with a purposeful, cost-effective and engineered approach to industrial wireless. At the end of the day, the financial and operations benefits of industrial wireless are most effectively realized with an open solution architectures that is capable of utilizing the best technologies and applications available – from any vendor. By using the best tools for the job and an open wireless infrastructure like Apprion’s ION system, you will avoid the limitations of a single vendor solution and the constraints imposed by previous deployments of wireless applications and instead enjoy the full breadth of benefits of wireless in all areas of plant operations. About Apprion Apprion delivers industrial application network systems and services designed for the process manufacturing industry. Apprion’s ION system provides the only unified, open and secure industrial application network for plant managers and their engineering and IT organizations. ION optimizes the manageability and performance of the wireless devices, systems and networks within plants so that managers gain the highest value possible from information generated by their operational and productivity applications. Apprion’s industrial products and services enable the deployment of wireless applications with the lowest total cost of ownership. Customers include market leaders in oil and gas, chemical and power/utilities. Apprion is located in Moffett Field, California. For more information about the company, its products and sales office locations, visit www.apprion.com . PDF資料下載[/font]