Emerson Introduces Control System Modularity

For many manufacturers in the chemical, life sciences, and pharmaceutical spaces, the future is fraught with both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, an increasingly stringent regulatory environment has made production more cost-prohibitive for these companies in the past several years. At the same time, projected increases in global per capita drug spending have ensured continuing strong demand for the industries’ products.

Luckily, digital transformation has provided a multitude of tools capable of cutting costs while also increasing production capacity. While traceability has helped to meet quality and regulatory requirements more easily, the ability to deploy modular assets more flexibly has allowed manufacturers to keep up with ballooning demand by increasing speed-to-market.

Recent activity by Emerson serves to illustrate this trend. The company announced that it will begin integrating Module Type Package (MTP) protocol automation standards into its DeltaV and PACSystems control systems to help manufacturers lower project and operation costs while also reducing changeover times for varied product runs.

Developed by the User Association of Automation Technology in Process Industries (NAMUR), MTP provides a vendor-neutral interface specification that can be used to define many common interface categories encountered when integrating complex process control equipment into a plant. The protocol provides standardized definitions of all information assets required to communicate to higher-level systems, increasing interoperability and allowing individual process modules to be added and removed without excessive reconfiguration.