Plant automation
Control systems, safety instrumented systems, drives and plant-wide integration, designed for plants that cannot afford a long stop.
Plant automation is where Halden started in 1986 and it is still the largest of our practice areas. We design and deliver the control layer of a plant: the controllers, the safety systems, the drives, the operator interfaces and the integration that ties them to the plant's data and business systems.
What we deliver
- Distributed control and PLC systems for continuous, batch and discrete processes.
- Safety instrumented systems designed and verified to IEC 61511, with independent review before commissioning.
- Drives and motion, including energy-optimised drive selection.
- Operator interfaces designed with the operators who will use them, following the ISA-101 guidance on high-performance HMI.
- Integration with historians, MES, maintenance and ERP systems, so the control layer feeds the plant's reporting without manual re-keying.
Brownfield is our speciality
Most of our automation work is on plants that are already running. The usual constraint is a maintenance window of a few days, sometimes hours. We plan the cutover around that window, build and test the new system off site, and keep a tested rollback path until the plant has run a full cycle on the new system.
How a project runs
- Site assessment. A solutions engineer walks the plant with your operations and maintenance leads and writes up constraints, risks and options. You get the write-up whether or not you go further.
- Design. Functional design specification agreed with your team, with a fixed scope and named engineers.
- Build and factory acceptance test. The system is built and tested at one of our engineering centres against the agreed specification, with your engineers present.
- Site acceptance and commissioning. Done with your operators, in your maintenance window, with a rollback plan.
- Handover. Documentation, training and a service contract if you want one.
Multi-vendor by default
Almost every plant we work on runs a mix of vendors. We design for that, integrate with the major control and drive platforms, and maintain third-party equipment alongside our own under lifecycle services.