In Europe, more and more power plant operators want to buy their plants from only one source. For plant construction companies this means that in addition to the automation they are supposed to deliver also the complete instrumentation including the cabling. Therefore a gigantic data volume gets generated and needs to be managed. Different subcontractors and incompatible data multiply the expenditure. At the same time increasing safety requirements make central project planning inevitable.
Integrated engineering
Power & Water Solutions division of Emerson Process Management, entity of the US-American Emerson Electric Corporation, met this requirement by joining a partnership with AUCOTEC. Thus in addition to the control and automation technology, Emerson can now offer a full service package including the electrical engineering, all the way down to wiring information for cabinets. Emerson is the market leader for developing automation solutions for the power generation, water treatment and waste water industries.
Aucotec's software system Engineering Base (EB) for complete process automation has been integrated into the Emerson control system ‘Ovation’, resulting in a new product named Ovation Documentation Builder. In the power plant sector, the bandwidth of EB ranges from the flow diagram via the documentation to the complete automation engineering job. Emerson is doing both, project planning with Engineering Base as well as reselling Ovation Documentation Builder towards their end customers, providing them with complete documentation in electronic format.
Step by step consistency
© Emerson Process ManagementThe combination results in an enormous saving of time, for one thing because duplicate maintenance of up to 20,000 I/O's is superfluous, and also because of the synchronization between DCS database and project documentation generated by Ovation Documentation Builder.
The new Emerson workflow is subdivided into six steps, with the two systems ideally supplementing each other: It starts with the field instrumentation in Ovation Documentation Builder and simultaneous definition of the plant concept in Ovation and goes via loop generation including typicals and cabinet configuration down to the assignment statistics resulting in intelligent documentation.
Cooperation leads to major contract wins
The cooperative solution is already paying back through several major projects, e.g. for an 800 MW power plant in Germany and in a very large hydroelectric complex in the Ukraine. According to its own management the combination of hardware system supplier and engineering service provider makes Emerson a strong force in the European market and in the long run also puts them ahead in global competition.
