Introduction to Foxboro DCS Training

My early phase of my career life with Optimal is expected to be filled with a lot of training. Recently, I have attended a 1 week course on Introduction to Foxboro DCS. In layman's term, it is basically an introductory course for control system engineers and plant operators about Foxboro DCS system used in Optimal plant.

It is only an introductory course but look how thick the manual is!

We learnt about the basic architecture of Foxboro DCS network and the related software. This course was attended by 10 operators and engineers from various units in Optimal (namely Olefins, Derivatives, Butanol, Utilities and Maintenance <- that's me!).

The course participants

The trainer for this course was Mr. Tarek Kamal from Foxboro Egypt and he was very knowledgable about the DCS architecture, hardwares and softwares of Foxboro. We gained a lot of information from this introductory course.

"OAJ stands for Operator Action Journal" - Mr. Tarek Kamal of Foxboro

It really opened my mind about DCS (Distributed Control System) and Foxboro system itself. I also got to experience using the Foxboro workstations which is based on Unix operating systems. The hardware is also propriety to Sun (the developer of Unix OS) and the keyboard layout is different from usual Windows keyboard layout and I took some time to get used to it. Overall, the course was good and the goodies bag from Foxboro sweetened the course delivery. Heheheh~

The bag contains a denim Foxboro short sleeve shirt and notepad

p/s: What I love about attending training is that I can save on my lunch money. :P