DDS™ - The Proven Data Connectivity Standard for IoT™ Nov. 2016 | Page 17

CHALLENGE Ulstein has developed control systems for the maritime sector for decades, and are continuously seeking to improve their solutions and products to solve the demanding challenges their customers face. Their search for an improved control system platform led them towards the Data-Distribution Service. Find how their use of DDS simplifies both system architecture, development and testability. The technical challenges Ulstein met while implementing existing middleware on a large-scale automation system forced them to think in a new direction. With about 100 integrated automation systems for ships delivered the last decade, all based on SCADA / PLC platform, Ulstein needed to change and open up their architecture. All issues regarding old versions, compatibility issues, dying support of various software platforms required a new solution. In addition Ulstein saw that the number of signals or I/Os were increasing rapidly, causing engineers to spend too much time in tuning and making SCADA platform work with all details and the risk/time in critical parts of projects during commissioning were not acceptable. The question was on how the company could reduce complexity of large-scale control systems. The Ulstein engineers were looking for a solution that would be based on open standards and open software, vendor-neutral and not bundled with hardware. SOLUTION Quite early in the development project one of Ulstein engineers looked at middleware options for large and safety-critical systems and discovered the DDS standard. In the beginning, Ulsten kept the middleware—they had for a while, and only implemented DDS as a replacement of their JASON implementation for controller – GUI communication. Then the company implemented DDS as the central backbone for communication between GUIs, controllers and IO Controllers with a range of fieldbus connections. BENEFITS Now Ulsten engineers spend less time in development and testing, as DDS tackles large numbers of signals, components and physical devices and it is proven technology with reliable support. This also enabled the company to implement a simple, vendor-neutral architecture with low-cost hardware for a large safety-critical control system. Having a standardized software solution with DDS implementation also saved Ultsen time and costs for developing their new integrated automation platform on top of the same DDS architecture. The adoption of DDS opened up an endless range of opportunities for what Ulsten can build on this platform. 17 CASE STUDIES Ulstein Builds Distributed Monitoring and Control with DDS