Original article by Sherry LaBonne can be found here: Rockwell Automation

Extend the power of your design by managing multiple controllers and devices in one place through FactoryTalk Design Hub by Rockwell Automation.

Complex Systems Require Data Context

Today's automation system designers face a dizzying array of responsibilities that must be addressed to confirm that each project is successful. They are expected to deliver systems that are easy for others to understand and maintain, all while staying on time and under budget. The increasing complexity of automation systems can make it difficult to manage all of the devices involved. It can be a challenge to generate and aggregate useful data from these devices, and to provide a clear image of all of this to the operations and maintenance teams.

As these teams troubleshoot unplanned downtime, investigate efficiency updates, or begin to learn a new system, they are engaging with data that are primarily generated by the controls system. The sheer amount of data aggregated across systems with multiple controllers and devices can quickly become overwhelming unless meaning and context are provided. With the new FactoryTalk® Design Studio™, making sense of all of this data is easier than ever.

FactoryTalk Design Studio makes this possible by enabling designers to:

• Create more logical, intuitive system models
• Program systems independent of hardware
• Manage multiple controllers and devices in one place

Model Your System Based on Its Purpose

How do we enable your users to shift their focus from the controllers to what is being controlled? Traditionally, systems have been designed to "fit" around the controllers where the code is executing. This approach can be limiting because it doesn't provide any information about how the different components of the system actually behave and interact in the real world! FactoryTalk Design Studio enables you to provide this needed context to users in an easy and intuitive way by building a system model. 

Of course, not all production systems are built the same, so system model creation must be flexible. FactoryTalk Design Studio allows you to build your model however you want, across any industry. Is your data best modeled by location, by function, or by industry-specific standard? It’s up to you! With your model in place, you’ve established the context of your data at the foundation of your system – the control level. Defined here, any software leveraging your control system data can take advantage of the built-in context, without needing to rebuild separate models for historians, analytics dashboards, and so on. 

There are even more benefits to the system model approach. In FactoryTalk Design Studio, the logical content you create is abstracted from the hardware – meaning that you can write code for all of the functions of your system before deciding which controllers it will execute in and which I/O hardware it will be bound to. This not only provides flexibility in your project timelines, but it greatly decreases the risk introduced if your customers rewrite their hardware requirements or need to make a module swap at the last minute! 

Hear from Engineers who use FactoryTalk^® Design Studio™. Watch the Webinar Now

Reducing System Design Complexity

Being able to create your system based on what it’s doing, not which hardware it’s executing in, and having the flexibility to make those decisions about hardware and execution whenever is most convenient for you – this sounds great, but what happens when your systems start getting bigger?

You don’t want to break that contextualized data up across multiple projects! This is why FactoryTalk Design Studio gives you the ability to manage all of your controllers and devices in one place. And with all of your controllers in the same project and aware of each other’s data, you’ll be able to configure communications and data sharing more easily.

As you scale up the number of controllers and devices in a system, managing software and firmware revisions can be a burden. FactoryTalk Design Studio is built to be managed and delivered in the cloud, so you’ll never have to worry about installing or updating versions.

But what about compatibility with your device firmware and add-on profiles? We have that covered too! FactoryTalk Design Studio will support multiple revisions of firmware, starting with the ControlLogix® and CompactLogix™ versions 34 and forward. And you’ll never have to download a missing add-on profile for a Rockwell Automation device again.

FactoryTalk Design Studio is being built from the ground up to allow you to manage all of your controllers and devices in one automation project, and to give you the flexibility to design logical system models, so you can deliver systems that are easy to build and easy to maintain. Curious about the other transformative features that are available with FactoryTalk Design Studio? Learn more about how Rockwell is modernizing your development experience and empowering teams to be more productive than ever by contacting Paul Bouteiller, Automation Specialist at Electrozad today.