CitectScada V6.0 has a number of major features, including an innovative tool for analysing alarms and trends, zero-maintenance Web Client, support for true colour, hundreds of new symbols, longer tag names, time-stamped data and custom alarm filters.
Over a period of weeks Citect demonstrated CitectScada V6 to many of its distributors, CIPs and users. The company reports a positive response to all the new features, but the feature that has generated the most excitement was the Process Analyst - with many users indicating that they will upgrade their existing CitectScada system to V6 just to get their hands on the Process Analyst.
Process Analyst
Whilst all HMI/scada systems collect and store large amounts of data from the site, plant or facility, very little time is spent analysing it. The reason for this is that analysing data in the past has always been time-consuming. In the words of Paul Donald, the telemetry officer at Central Highlands Water, "The Process Analyst eliminates the need for engineers to build custom analysis screens. For example, if an unexpected incident occurs, an operator can create an on-the-fly Process Analyst view which compares pump run times, pump fault alarms, flow-rates and valve settings instead of having to look at four different sources of information."
How it works
Process Analyst allows operators to analyse the cause of process disturbances by bringing together trend and alarm data, which is traditionally stored separately. Rather than having to compare a separate historical analog trend display with an alarm summary or log printout, users can simply view them all on a single integrated display.
Complete flexibility is provided to the operator on how the pens can be displayed, for example they can be overlaid or stacked and any pen can be placed in different panes to reduce clutter and make the display easier to read. The ability of the Process Analyst to display such rich information requires it to have an easy-to-use, yet powerful navigation system.
The Process Analyst includes many features including the indication of daylight savings time, accuracy to millisecond resolution, customisable toolbars, rich printing and saving of all display settings for easy recall. Some areas worthy of further comment are:
Pen styles
Different pen types have different attributes, all of which can be assigned different styles. Each pen in the display can be individually customised in terms of colour, quality styles, sample markers and even the way data is requested. For example for an analog alarm the user can select a different colour for each alarm state such as low low, low, high, high high, deviation and rate of change. An indication is also provided of when the alarm was acknowledged by the operator or whether it has been gated/disabled.
Navigation
The navigation system provides ultimate control over the data for display:
* Jump to the current time.
* Jump back and forward through time.
* Drag the pane backward and forward through time.
* Change the time-span using a pre-defined list of spans.
* Change the time-span to a user-defined value.
* Directly enter a start and/or end time.
* Fit the span to current/next/previous hour, day, month, etc.
* Replay trends and alarms by automatic scrolling through historical data.
Zooming
The Process Analyst includes an interactive zooming feature allowing operators to fine tune how much they want to zoom in or out by dragging the mouse against the horizontal or vertical axis. The Process Analyst also provides other zooming operations including: zoom in or out in steps, undo last zoom, box zooming and reset to default.
Examples of use
Root cause analysis
When a process upset or disturbance occurs it is always time-consuming to have to find the root cause. In the past the process engineer had to compare trend data from the screen with alarm logs. With Process Analyst, all the engineer has to do is simply add any pen (analog, digital, alarm) that could have contributed to the process upset to the display. Each process change can then easily be compared as alarms occur, enabling sophisticated analysis of the process upset.
Compare different batches
With Process Analyst it is easy to compare different batches in a single integrated view. Simply place all the variable tags, alarms and state changes for a batch unit on one pane, and the same set on a separate pane. Then the operator simply has to scroll one of the panes through time. Any differences in the batch execution will immediately be visible.
Sequence of events
With scada systems, the data is distributed around a wide area and typically the RTUs collect the data at millisecond resolution and send it to Citect scada every time it is polled. The Process Analyst displays historical alarms and trends to millisecond accuracy, making it easy to determine the sequence of events.
For more information contact Wilhelm Swart, regional manager, Citect SA, 011 699 6600, [email protected], www.citect.com
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