SIS Remote Maintenance Interface with Secure Diagnostic Mediation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current safety instrumented systems (SIS) in industrial plants lack efficient remote monitoring and maintenance capabilities, which can lead to delays in addressing component failures and potential safety hazards, while also risking false trips due to inadequate interaction with process control systems.
Innovation Solution
A dual interface layer comprising a diagnostic status aggregator and an interface processing engine allows users to access SIS information remotely through a mobile device using speech or text, with a unidirectional data flow to ensure security and safety, enabling continuous health and diagnostic status data collection and retrieval without direct interaction with the SIS.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If direct interaction with SIS is implemented for remote monitoring, then ease of operation is improved, but reliability deteriorates due to risk of false trips and security issues
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an interface processing engine as an intermediary layer between the user device and the SIS. This engine receives natural language requests from users, converts them into structured queries, and retrieves information from the SIS without allowing direct user interaction with the safety system. This mediator approach enables remote monitoring convenience while preventing false trips by filtering and validating all access requests through a controlled interface layer.
2Ease of operation
If remote access components directly interact with SIS, then ease of operation is improved, but security deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The dual-layer interface architecture implements a security intermediary where the interface processing engine handles all user interactions and only communicates with the SIS through controlled, unidirectional data flow. The engine parses user requests, generates appropriate queries, and retrieves data without exposing the SIS to direct external access, thereby maintaining security while enabling remote operation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system is segmented into distinct functional layers: the user device layer for interaction, the interface processing engine layer for query processing and security control, and the SIS layer for safety operations. This segmentation isolates the critical SIS from direct external access while maintaining remote operational capability through the intermediate processing layer.
3Reliability
If comprehensive diagnostic data collection is implemented, then reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complexity of data collection and processing from the SIS into a separate interface processing engine. The engine contains all the logic for parsing natural language requests, generating structured queries, and retrieving diagnostic data. This extraction allows the SIS to remain simple and focused on safety operations, while the interface layer handles the complexity of comprehensive data collection and user interaction.
Data Source
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AI summary
Dual layer interface with a safety instrumented system (SIS) in an industrial plant. A diagnostic status aggregator having an established connection with the SIS collects and stores health and diagnostic status data from the SIS. An interface processing engine communicatively coupled to the diagnostic status aggregator and to a user device receives a new request for information relating to the SIS from the user device. A memory stores processor-executable instructions that, when executed, configure the interface processing engine for parsing the new request to identify one or more specific keywords therein associated with the requested information relating to the SIS, generating a query based on the identified keywords, retrieving, from the diagnostic status aggregator, the status data collected from the SIS responsive to the query, and providing, the status data retrieved from the diagnostic status aggregator to the user device.