Yokogawa Electric Corporation has announced the release of version R3.30 of its Plant Resource Manager (PRM) software tool for the centralised management of large amounts of data from plant monitoring and control devices and manufacturing equipment. PRM R3.30 is an upgrade to R3.20 and includes an improved management function for HART and enhancements to the navigation function. With this new PRM version, Yokogawa aims to capture a larger share of the plant maintenance market.
Development background
Manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to improve maintenance efficiency by using software tools like PRM that can centrally manage large amounts of maintenance and other types of data from plant monitoring and control devices and manufacturing equipment. Maintenance personnel use such data to reduce plant downtime and enhance safety by proactively spotting and responding to device failures.
To optimise plant operations, it is essential not only to keep devices in good working order but also to have up-to-date information on device status and maintain records on all maintenance work that is performed. Such information is most useful if operators of control and safety instrumented systems can view it on screen at their human interface stations (HIS).
With such needs in mind, Yokogawa has developed new functions for its PRM tool that facilitate the collection of information from field devices for use in optimising device maintenance and plant operations.
Enhancements
• Quick access to HART device status information: PRM can now obtain start-up, stop, failure, and other status information from Yokogawa HART7 compliant devices in almost real time via the N-IO (Network-IO) field input/output (I/O) device that was developed for use with the latest version (R4.01) of the ProSafe RS safety instrumented system, which was released to the market in November 2015. For other companies’ HART5, 6, and 7 compliant devices, PRM can collect information at 1 minute intervals. With PRM R3.20, data collection at intervals of 10 to 60 minutes was supported.
• Intuitive display of device information: Icons indicating the importance of individual devices are now displayed in the device status window of the navigation screen. If a problem occurs somewhere in the plant, operators can use this information and the self-diagnostic information displayed for the devices to make a quick, priority-based response.
• Targeted issuance of alarms: PRM has a maintenance alarm function that issues alarms for display at Centum series integrated production control system HISs. Previously, alarms were issued to all HISs. With this latest version of PRM, it is now possible to specify which HIS should receive alarms from a specific device. Individual operators now only receive alarms from those devices that they are responsible for.
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