WP4: Migration

Develop strategies and plans for migration of process control systems towards new technologies like SOA, demonstrated in first trials of migration technology enabling integration of AESOP devices into legacy systems and vice-versa.

The WP will start from the state of the art with the migration requirements and opportunities, as the first actions, and form a generic migration strategy based on business, architectural and functional aspects. A typical focused future migration scenario will be described giving the base for the migration trial while describing engineering efforts and tools support. The architectural and functional aspects will be detailed and tools developed. In WP6 a migration trail will be performed based on the scenario selected and followed by a trail analyze and the updating of migration strategies and plans.

Two main drivers for process control upgrades are crystallized, obsolescence and functionality needs that can be summarized in following examples.

• Improve system and process efficiency, eliminate obsolescence and reduce operation and maintenance costs.
• Moving to open process automation architecture work with modern instrumentation systems (increased functionality, performance etc) and adopt industry standards. Remaining with old systems can also make it hard to realize how technology has progressed.
• Meeting spare parts requirements and lower training costs.
• Total plant visibility versus process or process section visibility via easier access to system data enabling better business decisions.
• More synchronized processes and increase production flexibility adapting to specific production and plant requirements.

To summarize. There is a big need to meet various migration requirements both in small and large scale process control system investments, projects and upgrades. Migrating towards new functionally, new technology and new systems is risky and the migration must eliminate risks like long downtime, long time to gain expected performance, fail to train, over do, under use new functionality, unexpected downtimes and missing easy opportunities to improve reliability, quality and productivity.