More than 250 delegates from the industrial control industry attended Futuristix-Wonderware’s breakfast seminar at the Indaba Hotel in Johannesburg on 6 June 2002. The highlight of this nationwide road show is the realtime and live development of a control project from conceptual design to implementation.
The Johannesburg presentation marked the halfway mark in the series of annual nationwide seminars that have become a landmark in the diaries of production managers, engineers and technicians involved in all aspects of manufacturing, production and industrial control applications.
"Applications are getting increasingly sophisticated because they have to provide concrete help to end-users and system integrators involved with ever more complex projects," says Mike le Plastrier, MD of Futuristix-Wonderware. "That is why this year we chose to actually show delegates solutions in action in their environments rather than simply talk about their virtues from behind the safety of slide shows. We also focused on process control rather than MES and maintenance issues."
During two 45-minute sessions, delegates witnessed the definition of a process and its flowcharting followed by the automatic development of a PLC program to support the control application as well as the development of an HMI for visualisation of the process. This was followed by the integration of the new project into a live and running data historian, the development of a Web reporting application for remote viewing and monitoring of the process and finally, the implementation of a disaster recovery and software change management solution for PLCs and HMIs.
"I think what impressed people most was the speed, ease and thoroughness with which the project was developed," says le Plastrier. "In addition, it was also simulated, tested and fully documented before going live."
While process engineers pay meticulous attention to the details of the process logic, the same cannot always be said about the attention paid to the process of getting there in the first place. "Solutions like ProDef," says le Plastrier, "let engineers adopt a top-down approach to their projects by automatically applying and enforcing standards, documenting projects and automatically generating PLC code. This allows engineers to focus on their projects rather than the supporting technologies."
ProDef allows process engineers and programmers to rapidly develop industrial applications that integrate their existing or new control system resources. ProDef is used to write functional specifications and control code for such devices as Siemens, Allen Bradley, Modicon and Mitsubishi PLCs as well as Wonderware's InControl soft PLC solution. ProDef is also used to configure HMIs such as Wonderware's InTouch and to integrate with batch controllers such as Wonderware's InBatch. ProDef automatically documents projects with HTML using XML and XSL style sheets.
In the live breakfast demonstrations, ProDef was used to define and flowchart the process before compiling the code for the PLC. ProDef then automatically linked the tag information to an InTouch HMI for process visualisation and control.
InTouch was then linked to Wonderware's InSQL 8.0 realtime data historian. InSQL 8.0 is a new, higher performance release of this industry standard database, which allows for the live linking and definition of new process data while running. Should the data link to the InSQL server be lost for any reason, the possibility exists to store data in any other location during the interruption. InSQL 8.0 will then fetch and seamlessly patch the missing data into its data stream when connections are restored. "The ability to start a new database and to insert data automatically or manually anywhere without having to restart the system is a major advantage for developers and authorised operators," says le Plastrier.
Remote viewing of the process was then enabled using Wonderware's SuiteVoyager Web portal that supports truly thin clients, multiple views and the latest definition of Web parts from Microsoft. Finally, the PLC and HMI software were backed up using the MASS AutoSave solution from MDT Software.
MASS AutoSave is a realtime interactive Change Management, programmable device support (PDS) software system that provides full documentation, audit trails, security, uploads, downloads, comparisons and archiving for PLCs, HMIs and robots. It uses a Windows environment and is fully integrated with program-panel software. MASS AutoSave unites plant automation software under one common user interface that creates a centralised, documented, well-defined, more productive and secure automation programme environment for the management of control software modifications and releases.
"Since IT is entering the world of scada and PLCs (soft or traditional), it makes sense that this environment should benefit from the software management principles that are applied to other levels of the company and MDT's MASS AutoSave is designed to do just that," says le Plastrier.
If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then these breakfast seminars are achieving their purpose. "Some engineers scanning the fact sheets for the solutions used in these presentations may think that the products seem too good to be true," says le Plastrier. "That is why we thought we would show rather than tell."
For more information contact Mike le Plastrier, Futuristix, tel: 011 723 9900, e-mail: [email protected], or website: www.futuristix.co.za
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