Articles & Blogs

As industrial organizations expand their deployment of smart sensors, it is becoming increasingly more complex to manage configuration consistency across field device management, distributed control systems (DCS), programmable logic controllers (PLC), safety instrumented systems (SIS), historians and other operational technology (OT). Managing the complex configuration of millions of multi-vendor sensors has become a major challenge for our customers – and this also puts business-critical digital transformation initiatives at risk as well. Available as a new module in PAS Automation Integrity™, Sensor Data Integrity provides multi-vendor:

• Discovery of smart, industrial IoT, and traditional analog sensors
• Visibility to the complete inventory and potential cyber vulnerability for sensors
• Creation of templates to define approved configuration for each sensor type
• Automated detection of configuration errors
• Automated identification of devices that don’t match assigned templates
• Cross-checking of parameters (ranges, units, etc.)
• Support for large-scale, multi-site sensor deployments
• Sensor signal tracing, validation and visualization

The information provided by Sensor Data Integrity can also be leveraged by sensor asset management systems (AMS) to support instrument calibration and can feed PAS Cyber Integrity™ to support cybersecurity vulnerability assessments.

With Sensor Data Integrity, industrial organizations can:

• Reduce manual effort in reconciling sensor and field device configurations
• Improve plant performance and reduce safety risk (e.g., fewer unit trips due to bad configurations)
• Reduce sensor configuration drift and errors by more than 40%
• Enhance decision-making with higher-quality sensor diagnostics
• Leverage sensor data for vulnerability assessment and obsolescence planning
• Reduce sensor-related cost overruns before startup (e.g., accelerated loop check out)

PAS has a strong history of customer-led innovation and the development of Sensor Data Integrity builds on that tradition with key customers collaborating closely on its development. The expansion of smart sensors is making it increasingly difficult for operations teams to monitor configuration drift and inconsistencies. This means their teams are spending more time trying to find issues instead of correcting them, which increases the risk of poor plant performance and cyber vulnerabilities. We are pleased PAS, now part of Hexagon, is the first technology provider addressing this challenge with a multi-vendor solution that works across OT systems.