Yokogawa Electric Corp. announced Release 5 of the Centum VP integrated production control system, the company’s flagship product and a cornerstone of the VigilantPlant concept that aims to help customers realize the ideal plant. Developed with the aim of bringing companies operational excellence through the use of field digital technology, this latest version of Centum VP will be released to the market in August of this year.
With Centum VP Release 5 as a key platform, Yokogawa intends to continue to provide solutions that help customers’ plants achieve operational excellence, with an eye on becoming the leading company in the IA business.
Field digital technology has been introduced in many industries and is helping to increase maintenance efficiency in manufacturing plants. Yokogawa started developing field digital technology in earnest when it first released Foundation Fieldbus compliant products in 1998. Advances in field digital technology have led to drastic increases in the volume and variety of field data, and Yokogawa notes its customers are now seeking to make better use of this resource.
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Recognizing control systems must now be capable of handling large amounts of field data at production speeds, Yokogawa developed a new field control station (FCS) said to fully satisfy such needs. This new release will improve the use of plant information and reduce lifecycle costs.
Centum VP Release 5 features include a new Field Control Station (FCS) with four times the processing performance, twice the application storage capacity, and five times the control network throughput as before; a Unified Gateway Station (UGS) for better integration of all plant systems, enhanced Alarm Management based on ISA18.2 and includes new functions that have been optimized for the management of change process specified in the ISA18.2 standard’s alarm management lifecycle model; and, Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Support.
Bruce Jensen, Mgr. Systems Marketing and Solutions Support, told Automation World that the company will begin taking orders August 19 with delivery beginning about September 22. He further noted that not only is this release targeted toward operators, maintenance personnel will find it useful looking at integrating calibration, instrument diagnostics and device parameters. “We’re seeing maintenance personnel and operation personnel exchanging information more and more, particularly device alerts and diagnostics,” he added. “And we see more demand from the engineers for real-time and historical information to diagnosis process events.”
Jensen enumerated several additional benefits:
- Improved performance, both from controller ability to service all sources of data requests to presentation to operators, maintenance and engineering,
- Lower capital costs by having fewer controllers and cabinets,
Improved equipment deployment due to fiber optic I/O subsystems – architectural flexibility, - Improved integration from variety of subsystems that makes data showing up on a display appear native,
- Enhanced capability to move from simple diagnostics to more complex equipment diagnostics,
- Expandability due to expanded controller capacity, and
- Support for 64 bit Windows platforms will help with the performance aspects.
Yokogawa Corp.
www.yokogawa.com/us
