In the more than 40 years that I have been involved with industrial automation there have been only a small number of “whiteboard moments,” moments in which a company detaches itself from the mainstream and develops an entirely new system that fully encompasses state-of-the-art technology. MODICON provided a whiteboard moment in 1968 with the introduction of the first PLC. Honeywell provided a whiteboard moment in 1975 with the introduction of the first distributed control system, and Foxboro had its whiteboard moment in 1988 with the first open industrial system. Since that time, control systems have been making only small, incremental advancements in their platforms, while still working on mid-1980s technology concepts and constraints.
As they advanced, their installed base insisted on tight backward compatibility, which essentially hamstrung them from accelerated technological advancement. The result is mainstream industrial automation platforms that are antiquated by today’s standards and unable to take full advantage of many major technology advancements of the modern digital age. Bedrock Automation changed all that with the first whiteboard moment in four decades when it introduced its Open Secure Automation (OSA ® ) platform. Bedrock OSA represents significant innovation in both automation system design and manufacturing. The results are almost overwhelming when compared to other control systems in the market today.
OSA is a new class of automation system that taps into the huge pool of potential value realized from the effective application of automation and control, including significant industrial process, safety, environmental and profitability improvement. Bedrock OSA is the key to unlocking the value that has been suppressed by proprietary technologies, unnecessary complexity and cyber vulnerability. It provides revolutionary advancements in cybersecurity, openness, ease-of-use, simplicity of design, performance and user value.
The need for inherent cyber security
In the mid-1980s, when the last whiteboard moment occurred, automation systems development was completed in a relatively isolated manner in that the IT revolution had not yet begun and control systems were decoupled from early IT computing and networking systems. In these early years, cyber security threats, risks and defensive technologies were non-existent in digital product designs. However, on August 6, 1991, the world wide web became publicly available, unleashing continuous innovations in IT computing, components, networking, software, and cyber security, which the automation OEMs have been slow to integrate into ICS in a meaningful way.
As OT and IT naturally converged through the 1990s and to the present day, automation systems responded to growing cyber threats to their platforms by bolting on IT technologies such as firewalls and analytics. This approach improves a legacy OT security posture, but proves complicated, expensive, and vulnerable over time. In parallel, industrial cyber-attacks have become more frequent and critical as nation-states and rogue thieves attack IT and OT systems, mostly for financial gain and IP theft. Bedrock Automation founder Albert Rooyakkers and his design team mandated from day zero on a whiteboard that the only way to achieve the necessary levels of cyber security was to design it in from inception – into all system components, hardware, firmware, software, and manufacturing operations.
The result is over 30 distinct technologies that are more common in military and aerospace applications but now buried deeply into the Bedrock products. An example is pin-less I/O backplanes and modules to eliminate snooping and EFT and EMP vulnerabilities. Another example is injecting a Hardware Root of Trust in every OSA digital device. This is done by inserting immutable keys and certificates into the semiconductor components at a highly secured US manufacturing facility, which Bedrock has also designed and built. Never has such military level security been available in an industrial automation system.
The combined cyber digital and cyber physical technologies designed into Bedrock OSA almost certainly make it the most intrinsically secure automation system on the market today. In the politically challenging, connected digital world in which we operate, this level of security is essential.
The need for open platforms
To realize the full business value of automation systems, engaging and interacting with other automation and IT systems effectively is more essential than ever. Traditional automation suppliers have had limited success in interoperating proprietary systems. The proprietary designs behind traditional automation systems have combined with the lack of intrinsic security to present difficult barriers to integration. Bedrock system designers solved the dichotomy of open and secure by solving security from inception. The IDE software for application development is based on IEC 61131 that automatically authenticates the user, the application environment and the runtime.
Bedrock OSA supports virtually all legacy and standard communications for interconnectivity and flexible migration strategies for users. Once connected, legacy protocol data is translated to modern open protocols for purposes of control, SCADA or enterprise access. This intrinsic openness that exploits the intrinsic security is the only approach to enable truly open systems. It is important to realize that openness without security is dangerous in an interconnected world. Bedrock OSA is the only truly open and truly secure automation system.
The importance of making it easy
For decades, automation users have complained about ease of use. By starting with a clean slate, Bedrock leverages software-defined hardware to make the system as easy to learn and use as modern technology allows. Some traditional automation systems have approached ease-of-use by limiting the functionality the system offers. This made simple capabilities easy to use, but more complex functions more difficult to implement. Bedrock took a different approach by building ease-of-use across all advanced system elements.
A single IEC 61131 software toolbox allows configuration of OSA products and control strategies in one environment. This includes a visualization toolset for graphics, trending, and diagnostics that runs synchronously with the secure control code, flattening and simplifying user applications. Support of secure OPC UA and MQTT enables users to select from multiple 3 rd party SCADA OEMs. Engineers and operators can select and plug-and-play with a familiar HMI. The result is an easy-to-build advanced system of any size for any application.
On top of this, OSA provides an array of built-in software for maintenance diagnostics and cyber analytics that can be accessed by SCADA and enterprise systems. Never have I seen a fully functional automation platform be this integrated and easy to use.
Simplicity by design
Automation systems have traditionally been complex to apply to specific plants and automation challenges. This requires design and application engineers to develop and implement appropriate system configurations for specific plants. This is a necessary approach when the process itself is complex. As a result, applying a complex system to a complex plant expounds the complexity and cost of ownership. Bedrock reduced application complexity significantly by radically reducing the number of system elements required for a project.
In my recent visit to Bedrock, I saw a customer project that will upgrade a water treatment plant using only four Bedrock part numbers. Combined with software defined controllers, power supplies, gateways and I/O, all aspects of system design and deployment have been reimagined. Not only is OSA simple to apply, but it is also equally simple to modify and grow as process plant needs dictate. The cost savings in applying and growing Bedrock over traditional automation systems are phenomenal. Additionally, all modules are constructed of sealed metal for easy handling, reduced cabinet design complexity, long-term ruggedness, and tamper resistance.
Therefore, installing and owning the system is less complex and costly. In fact, my tour of the Bedrock secure manufacturing space that produces all Bedrock OSA parts is similarly uncluttered, simplified and truly next level.
The need for performance
Bedrock OSA is comprised of a small number of system modules, each of which is highly intelligent with advanced processing power, memory, and communications bandwidth. In most configurations the utilized capacity of the modules is a fraction of the overall capacity, future proofing it for users. Bedrock demonstrated controllers loaded with hundreds of PID loops and tens of thousands of ladder rungs running at sub 10mS control. Since all modules can be added as required, the overall performance of Bedrock OSA systems is essentially unlimited and could expand easily to safety, environmental and profitability control as well. Plant safety, for example, is often a function of the safety of each asset and asset set within a plant because most safety incidents start with an asset failure.
In fact, safety is mathematically equivalent to reliability with the addition of a larger consequence factor. Thinking of safety control from this perspective makes Bedrock OSA an ideal platform for real-time safety control. Likewise, environmental control can be thought of as extending safety control beyond the perimeter of the plant. So, plant managers can implement real-time environmental control in much the same way as real-time safety control, eliminating potential failures that may impact the environment outside the plant.
Controlling business value creation
For the most part, traditional automation users have applied process and logic control to improve process and machine efficiency. Some control engineers believe that they are already achieving the highest efficiency level that control strategies can deliver. As a result, they have not put much effort into evolving legacy control strategies to utilize the power of newer control systems and software tools. In addition, users mostly configure new systems to perform the same functions as their predecessors, missing out on the value improvement that newer technologies might afford. Consequently, control systems have devolved to commodities instead of being exploited to generate new operations strategies and business value.
This this is where Bedrock Automation comes back into the picture. The inherent security and openness of Bedrock OSA make it the ideal automation system to provide extended real-time control to asset reliability, across the plant and the enterprise. Isolated automation systems are relatively secure merely due to their isolation. But as soon as industrial companies strive to improve performance by extending the boundaries of their automation systems to all plant and business systems, including safety and environmental management, extremely high levels of cyber security are essential.
Controlling asset reliability involves detailed analysis of plant assets starting with the simplest plant floor assets to determine how their reliability declines and develop control strategies to respond effectively to asset reliability degradation. Because Bedrock OSA can be deployed to provide intrinsically secured process-based and asset-based control strategies, it is the ideal platform for development and implementation of asset reliability control strategies for base industrial assets. Plant units and work cells are comprised of base assets interconnected to perform some manufacturing or production function.
If the base assets have effective asset reliability control strategies in place, it is a relatively small step to develop asset control strategies at the unit of work cell levels. Likewise, since plant areas, and process trains involve numerous base assets, units and work cells, effective asset reliability control strategies can be developed at these levels as well. This progression can be accomplished all the way through entire plants and businesses. This provides effective real-time reliability control across entire manufacturing and production operations. And the more connected the domains, the greater the need for extreme performance, open communications, and intrinsic cyber security.
With the convergence of IT and OT into a single computing domain, predicated on inherent security, the domain required for real-time profitability control could become a reality. Bedrock OSA provides the foundations that capitalize on this domain and enable implementation of real-time process, safety, sustainability and profitability control. Control starts with real-time profitability measurements that can be implemented in Bedrock OSA using the combination of process and business measurements to model them. Once the enterprise performance measurements are implemented, Bedrock OSA has all the control tools necessary to implement real-time enterprise control.
Realizing increased business value does not happen merely by implementing the same process and logic control strategies on new technology. It happens when new levels of control – asset reliability, safety, environmental and profitability control–re-implemented over and above traditional control strategies. Experience has demonstrated that there is a significant amount of incremental business value available from existing manufacturing operations, and it is my opinion that the Bedrock OSA platform is a key to making this potential value a reality.
In summary
The first time I had a deep dive into what Bedrock OSA is, I was exhausted and incredulous. In a half-day at Bedrock, I heard about and witnessed the inherent security, openness, interconnect ability, ease of use, simplicity, extended control capability and advanced manufacturing operations. My initial impression was that this is way too good to be true . However, as I first described, Bedrock OSA was designed and developed using a whiteboard process while taking advantage of all the technological advancements that have taken place in industry over the past decades, focusing on the most modern trends and tools. This would be nearly impossible to implement in evolutionary systems.
Finally, Bedrock OSA has now been operating in numerous industrial processes for 4-5 years, validating it as a highly field-proven system. Yes–Bedrock OSA seems to be too good to be true–but it’s not! It really is that good.
