| Abstract: | Yokogawa, Mitsubishi, ILS Technology, Kepware, and EPLAN roll out new products that aim to enhance operational efficiency at the plant level and beyond. |
| Keywords: | ARC Forum, ARC Advisory Forum recap |
ORLANDO — A number of technology vendors used ARC Advisory Group's 12th annual forum this week as a platform for product announcements centered on the themes of integration and operational excellence.
The announcements — from a diverse group of vendors, including automation players Yokogawa Corp. of America and Mitsubishi Electric Automation, device connectivity providers ILS Technology and Kepware Technologies, and computer-aided engineering vendor EPLAN Software & Services LLC — all center on the idea of providing easy access to "actionable" information.
Perhaps the biggest news from here in Orlando is Yokogawa's introduction of its CENTUM VP next-generation distributed control system.
The integrated production control system is a product of Yokogawa's VigilantPlant initiative. Unveiled three years ago, the initiative focuses on integrating safety and process control, as well as asset diagnostics and alarm and event management. CENTUM VP aims to promote operational excellence with the help of a unified human machine interface (HMI) and a single real-time database that underlies the entire production organization, company officials said.
In May, Yokogawa will follow that up with the release of its Human Interface Station (HIS) for CENTUM VP, which runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The display will include a color-based layout, intended to help users easily access the right information through visual cues. Other features include a plant hierarchy viewer, a system message banner, a history window, and multiple tabs, including a "favorites" window. Collectively, the new interface will allow end users to quickly diagnose operational issues in order to make decisions faster, the company said.
"The HMI is designed to enable more actionable information and less data," said Satoru Kurosu, Yokogawa's senior vice president of the Industrial Automation Business, during a press conference here. In addition, the HMI is backward-compatible with the existing CENTUM CS 3000 DCS. "Our first priority is to avoid forcing new technology on users," he said.
The second aspect of Yokogawa's operational excellence initiative is a unified architecture based on a single real-time plant database, which will be available in the 2009-2010 time frame, Kurosu said. The unified database will be designed as the operational core and production organizer to integrate and manage process control, safety, assets, and lifecycle management, he said.
In a separate announcement targeting integrated control, Mitsubishi Electric used the ARC Forum to announce its e-F@ctory integrated platform, which it said combines motion, sequence, CNC, and robot control with connectivity to I/O networks and the enterprise.
e-F@ctory enables integration via four components: iQ Automation, a dual-bus backplane and multi-threaded architecture allowing thousands of data transactions to be handled by Mitsubishi's Q Series programmable automation controllers (PAC) on a per-second basis without compromising performance; iQ Works, a complementary integrated development environment; CC-Link IE (industrial Ethernet), a network architecture based on gigabit Ethernet technology providing essentially unlimited bandwidth; and MESI (manufacturing execution system interface), a communications channel that allows direct connection between shop floor controllers and enterprise servers.
Mitsubishi's MESI tool was developed in conjunction with ILS Technology, using ILS' deviceWISE direct-connect integration technology. MESI provides a direct link between the factory floor and the enterprise, leveraging policy-based security and menu-driven configurations that enable connectivity to IBM's WebSphere enterprise-based middleware or the DB2 database, for example.
Page : 12 ... NEXT
 |
|
|
|