Integrated Production Control System Provides Enhanced operation and Monitoring Functions for Greater Efficiency and Safety

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (the Netherlands) has announced the December 2 release of CENTUM VP(R) R6.02, a new version of the company's integrated production control system with enhanced functionality.

Ever since launching the CENTUM series 40 years ago, Yokogawa has continued to improve its flagship product. In keeping with Yokogawa's VigilantPlantvision for the control business, the company has developed a number of new operation and monitoring functions for CENTUM VP, the latest generation in the CENTUM series, that will make it easier for operators to keep track of what is happening in a plant.

Oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other downstream facilities have numerous suppliers to choose from and must deal with considerable variability in the composition of the raw materials that they receive, necessitating a number of changes to their processes. Further changes are necessitated by aging facilities and the need to vary production volumes to meet fluctuating demand. To respond to these challenges and ensure the safe and efficient operation of plant facilities, operators must be able to quickly and thoroughly check many different kinds of data.

CENTUM VP R6.02 comes with a more powerful real-time trend function for the visualisation of plant operating status. The alarm function has also been improved to make sure that alarm information is handed over to the operators on the next shift. This CENTUM VP release also features tight integration with ProSafe(R)-RS R4.01, which was released on November 27.

Real-time trend function for a clearer understanding of plant conditions - Enabling operators to perform data checking quickly and thereby keep up with an increasing number of changes in process requirements

The number of pens that can be checked in a single trend graph has been doubled to 16. The maximum number of data points that can be displayed for trend graphs has also been doubled, to approximately 13,000. This ensures that operators have all the information needed to stay on top of what is happening in their plants. In addition to conventional keyboard input, drag-and-drop functionality for the assignment of data to individual pens is supported from operation graphics, alarm lists, and the like. With these new functions, operators can enjoy quicker and more convenient access to data.

A new function has been added that displays real-time trend data and past long-term trend data in one continuous line, in the same window, enabling operators to easily track changes that take place over a longer period of time.

Preventing alarms from being misplaced or overlooked during handovers CENTUM VP has a function that temporarily sets aside (shelves) less urgent alarm notifications to ensure that operators can respond appropriately to high-priority alarms. While it is possible to check shelved alarms, the procedure involves several steps and there is a risk that it will not be performed. With CENTUM VP R6.02, there is a new list viewer that displays all shelved alarms. When operators use this together with a suppressed alarm list viewer that was previously released with CENTUM VP R6.01, there is less risk of such alarms being misplaced or overlooked following a handover.

Tight integration with ProSafe(R)-RS R4.01 CENTUM VP R6.02 offers improved integration with the ProSafe-RS R4.01 safety instrumented system, allowing monitoring of the N-IO (Network I/O), a new I/O device that is now available for use with ProSafe-RS R4.01, using the human machine interface (HMI) provided for both systems. Also, the Automation Design Suite (AD Suite) engineering tool now can save engineering data, manage the engineering history, and support I/O design for both the process control instrumentation and the safety instrumentation. This improved integration results in enhanced engineering efficiency throughout the entire plant lifecycle.

Major target markets include: process industries such as oil and natural gas, petrochemicals, chemicals, electric power, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, foods, iron and steel, and water and wastewater.

Applications include: operation, monitoring, and automatic control of plants.

Yokogawa has continually striven to improve its core CENTUM platform while maintaining backwards compatibility with previous system versions. In the development of CENTUM VP, the following four innovations have been emphasised: 1. Advanced operation - Empowers operators to make smarter decisions; 2. Smart engineering - A new engineering ecosystem that delivers certainty and confidence; 3. System agility - Flexibility, adaptability, and extensibility for plant upgrade and expansion, changes in plant operations, and business exigencies; 4. Sustainable plant - Optimum system performance throughout the entire lifecycle of the plant. 

In keeping with its VigilantPlant initiative, Yokogawa will continue to develop and bring to market new products and other types of solutions that will help its customers realise the ideal plant.