Posts tagged ‘Proficy’
Industrial Gateway Server 7.5 for Proficy Launched
GE Intelligent Platforms announced the availability of its Industrial Gateway Server (IGS) 7.5 drivers for the company’s Proficy® software. The enhanced offering, utilizing industry-standard Kepware KEPServerEX and driver technology, includes more than 100 protocols, enabling connectivity to thousands of different control devices and instruments.
A single IGS 7.5 instance allows for customers to connect to a variety of devices. IGS 7.5 provides users with an opportunity to consolidate information from different control hardware and instruments to visualize, control, analyze and optimize via connected Proficy HMI/SCADA, MES, EMI or Workflow software. It is optimized to use the maximum possible speed supported by the devices with built-in diagnostics for communication errors and complete browsing functionality into devices. This connectivity solution added to GE’s Proficy software portfolio allows customers to manage operations from a more complete perspective, allowing them to process various data points and co-relating multiple process indicators.
“The capabilities and functionalities of control hardware and instruments are being enhanced at the same pace as the software,” said Prasad Pai, Product Manager for GE’s Proficy iFIX software. “Newer communication standards and protocols are being introduced with the view of providing customers the ultimate flexibility in data acquisition and control. Due to these fast-paced changes, it is important to partner with a company, such as Kepware, focused solely on keeping abreast with the changes.”
“Today, with acquisitions/mergers and consolidation, companies inherit a variety of control hardware and instruments in their plants,” continued Pai. “The biggest challenge is how to consolidate them and bring them to a common data communication standard. The enhanced IGS 7.5 goes a long way in providing that solution.”
The enhanced IGS 7.5 application supports remote and offline configuration options without disrupting communications. Existing customers can upgrade seamlessly to the enhanced IGS 7.5 and access all the newly added device connectivity options quickly. GE’s ongoing work with Kepware keeps the product in tune with technology changes and enhanced with connections into newer devices.
GE Standardizes on Proficy for Remote Turbine Monitoring, Diagnostics
GE Energy’s Performance & Reliability Center (PRC) in Atlanta, GA has standardized on a remote monitoring and diagnostic platform that utilizes the company’s Proficy® Historian, Proficy SOA, Proficy Workflow and Proficy CIMPLICITY software.
This system monitors more than 1,100 units in GE Energy’s turbine fleet and provides customers with real-time data on impending failures and performance diagnostics. The legacy system utilized an Oracle-based relational database architecture that consumed more than 50 terabytes of storage across four database instances. Over time, the legacy solution became too costly to maintain and support and was not sufficiently extensible to sustain future growth.
“GE Intelligent Platforms delivers a solution that is flexible and scalable while lowering ongoing maintenance costs through simplified IT infrastructure and reduced storage demands. Improving availability and access to fleet data while leveraging diagnostic workflow capabilities will drive improved productivity of subject matter experts,” said Justin Eggart, Performance and Reliability Center leader for GE Energy Services. “The new system will enhance our focus on delivering customer value, applying advanced monitoring and diagnostics solutions, while proactively managing the performance and reliability of turbines and other assets in the GE fleet.”
GE Intelligent Platforms’ Next Generation M&D platform (Gen X), is based on proven, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products such as Proficy Historian, a platform for data acquisition and storage designed to handle time sequence data at speeds significantly faster than traditional relational databases algorithms that simply aren’t available in relational models, while also supporting a range of data compression. The result is better performance with lower disk utilization without any loss of data resolution.
Key to the solution is GE’s breakthrough work process management backbone for application development, Proficy Workflow, a highly scalable software solution due to its efficient storage model. Also used for this solution is Proficy CIMPLICITY, a client/server-based visualization and control solution that helps you visualize your operations, perform supervisory automation and deliver reliable information to higher-level analytic applications, resulting in faster responsiveness, reduced costs and increased profitability.
“We proved that our Proficy Software’s integrated capability to collect, organize, analyze and drive work processes around massive volumes of real-time data could meet the needs of GE Energy now and into the future,” said Erik Udstuen, VP Software and Services, GE Intelligent Platforms.
GE Fanuc Announces Proficy CIMPLICITY GlobalView
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms announced the availability of Proficy® CIMPLICITY GlobalView, a highly scalable application that delivers the power of CIMPLICITY to remote clients enabling real-time monitoring, data analysis and plant floor control from within a Web browser.
“Companies need access to real-time information about their operations at all levels of the organization,” said Claire Cerrato, General Manager of GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ Automation Software group. “Companies are increasing their mobile workforces and require highly scalable, non-compromising products to keep them connected. CIMPLICITY GlobalView enables full viewing and control of plant operations and expands the native integration of CIMPLICITY with GE Fanuc’s other Proficy software, providing additional solution possibilities.”
GlobalView provides a full-featured HMI/SCADA client delivered over the Web so operators, engineers and managers can view, react and operate from wherever they are. This enables efficient response to situations avoiding significant downtime, lost batches or catastrophic events. It also transforms the way teams work and collaborate, because with GlobalView multiple users can connect easily to the same system to analyze the situation and make quick, fact-based decisions. Users also don’t have to compromise functionality or re-write current applications in order to get accessibility. Ease of installation makes this a quick add-on for existing and new systems.
GlobalView extends GE Fanuc’s existing footprint in HMI/SCADA to knowledge workers not on or directly tied to the plant floor. GlobalView also introduced the Relay Server, which makes deploying HMI/SCADA on a massive scale possible. With a Relay Server deployed in the GlobalView architecture and multiple GlobalView servers underneath, customers have the ability to globalize their applications and support hundreds of simultaneous users with the only limitation being server hardware. The new software capability opens new doors to innovative, Web-only, CIMPLICITY-based applications providing the ability to connect to previous versions of CIMPLICITY without any additional development.
The product has been developed on top of CIMPLICITY, so it complies with GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ open and layered strategy and enables the Web user to harness the proven power of CIMPLICITY anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
“This product is a big step forward in the accessibility of real-time data to a large amount of users,” continued Cerrato. “GlobalView validates GE Fanuc’s commitment to providing innovative and scalable solutions to solve customer needs particularly in this challenging economic climate.”
GE Fanuc Launches Advanced Analytics Software for Facilities
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced advanced analytics solutions for its software portfolio that are designed to maximize the information that already exists in production operations, extract knowledge from that information and identify the opportunities to solve potential production issues before they impact the process. The introductions of Proficy® Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+, the updated release of Proficy Historian version 3.5, and the market leadership position of Proficy’s HMI/SCADA products combine to provide companies with unprecedented intelligence they can use to enhance process performance.
This powerful combination of solutions enables:
- Better understanding of the causes of variation and problems in the process as well as the real-time impact of the process on production assets;
- Learning the relationships between disconnected data, extracting knowledge and building business cases with benefit estimations;
- Preventing unnecessary conventional “alarm bursts” with more intelligent alarms that work in multivariate space, indicating causes of problems and providing corrective actions; and
- Expert knowledge capture for making modeling and expert system technology available to all users.
“Everyone not only needs some method for archiving plant data and a system for supervisory control and data acquisition, but also an effective way of doing rapid process troubleshooting and other continuous improvement initiatives utilizing its real-time plant data,” said John Leppiaho, Product General Manager for GE Fanuc’s Operations Management Software. “GE Fanuc’s Proficy Historian is already proven in industries all over the world for collecting, storing and retrieving mission-critical data. The addition of Proficy Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+ gives users advanced analytics and control of their processes to drive operational excellence.”
These solutions provide essentially a three-step process for advanced analysis starting with Proficy Historian 3.5, which collects, archives and distributes tremendous volumes of real-time process information at extremely high speeds. Built specifically for production and process data acquisition and presentation, Proficy Historian enables users to leverage increased process visibility for better and faster decisions, increased productivity and reduced costs. Proficy Historian is built to store and retrieve production/process data in the way companies need it. This capability enables better responsiveness by quickly providing the granularity of data needed to analyze and solve intense process applications.
The second component of the advanced analytics process is the new Proficy Troubleshooter product, an off-line, value-add product to Proficy Historian that analyzes process variation. It is used to identify causes for production problems and identify opportunities for preventing them in the future. Proficy Troubleshooter acts as a bridge between Proficy Historian and Proficy HMI/SCADA obtaining relationships between process variables and preparing benefit estimations for real-time deployment.
Proficy Troubleshooter has powerful multivariate modeling and data-mining techniques, but it does not require a background in advanced statistics or modeling. It also provides a clear path to real-time solutions for the user – deploying insights as a real-time intelligent monitoring and advisory solution in Proficy Cause+, with outputs displayed in Proficy HMI/SCADA and Web-based reporting.
The components of Proficy Troubleshooter are:
- Proficy Continuous Wizard – For troubleshooting time-based and/or continuous process data;
- Proficy Discrete & Batch Wizard – For troubleshooting generic index-based, discrete and/or batch process data; and
- Proficy Architect – For data preparation, simulation and solution development.
“In the past, we have had reporting tools that gave us an information baseline,” said Leppiaho. “Now we can apply analytics to that data and do ‘what-if’ scenarios to model the process for a solution more effective in driving real process improvement.”
After Proficy Troubleshooter models the solution, the next logical step is to put the process into production. Proficy Cause+ wires in the real-time data and introduces alarms based on causal relationships within the process. It extracts more value from real-time data, in the form of likely causes of process- or asset-related problems and variation in real time, with pre-configured corrective actions to the operator if alarm conditions are triggered.
Proficy Cause+ is a value-added decision-support solution to the Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX and CIMPLICITY products that also provides reporting on causes over specified periods of time for production management and process engineers. It enables real-time causes of process problems (e.g. bad batches), real-time corrective actions to address process problems, wizard-based and custom development and simulation of a real-time solution before deploying it within Proficy HMI/SCADA, model- and rules-based cause identification, Web-based reporting of causes over user-defined periods, intelligent alarming and capturing of expert knowledge for real-time expert system use.
Proficy Cause+ enables production engineers and process specialists to generate real-time causes for production process deviations. During such real-time Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) deviation, in-depth process knowledge is delivered to an operator to provide specific, actionable message guidance for correction. It is a real-time application by which production process variation is identified and whereby root causes for such variation is visualized. Proficy Cause+ is a value-added component deployed directly in existing HMI SCADA/DCS systems. Proficy Cause+ is therefore mostly used by plant operators.
“Progressive companies are achieving even greater benefits by extracting and applying knowledge from historical and real-time data with advanced analytics,” said Tom Fiske, Senior Analyst, ARC Advisory Group. “Traditionally, the use of advanced analytics required high domain expertise to apply effectively. This is no longer the case. Solutions such as those offered by GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms bring the power of real-time visibility and advanced analytics to the masses.”
PetroComputing 