In a recent presentation at the ARC Industry Leadership Forum 2024, Claudio Fayad, Emerson’s vice president of technology, process systems and solutions shared details about a groundbreaking project with ZEDEDA that focused on realizing the company’s automation vision and evolving its DeltaV™ control system.
During the presentation, Fayad outlined the key challenges Emerson was looking to solve, calling the company’s end goal “boundless automation.” Before engaging ZEDEDA, Emerson acknowledged that its existing automation had been created in vertical and horizontal silos with software trapped inside various automation systems. The company wanted to use artificial intelligence to manage its data but recognized that a siloed data architecture would not support its goals.
“Boundless automation,” Fayad explained, “is the vision where we bring [the data] all together under one context, to democratize the data.” To achieve true democratization, Emerson also wanted to focus on decoupling the data from the software. The company’s simplified vision included having “an infrastructure fabric … of the embedded nature of PLCs and control systems with the environments that will allow us to run the software that we have today like virtualization environments and hyperconverged environments.”
To expand DeltaV to the edge and the cloud, Emerson leveraged ZEDEDA’s edge management and orchestration solution to build its DeltaV™ Edge Environment. This new configuration essentially functions as a new node securely connected to the existing DeltaV infrastructure via a secure encrypted unidirectional protocol with a data diode option that enables contextual data replication.
By integrating ZEDEDA’s full technology stack into its DeltaV automation system, Emerson empowered its customers to gather real-time production insights, resulting in faster product development, while also reducing time, cost, and power consumption. Here are several more key benefits Fayad outlined:
- Improved cybersecurity and isolation: Data scientists and engineers can work with the data without needing physical access to the control system, enhancing security.
- Scalability: You can deploy and manage any number of nodes from a central location for updates, provisioning, and application deployment.
- Open standards and flexibility: The system uses open-source technologies and a lightweight Linux distribution, allowing for easy integration and customization.
- Support for existing applications: It can handle both virtual machines and containers, accommodating both new and existing applications.
- Data integration and manipulation: Data from various sources (DeltaV, OPC-EUA) can be combined, manipulated with various applications, and made available to other applications on-prem or in the cloud.
- Preserves existing infrastructure: You can integrate this system with your current setup without needing a complete overhaul.
Watch the full video to learn more about how ZEDEDA helped Emerson modernize its DeltaV automation system and simplify its industrial edge infrastructure.
