Control platform receives major upgrade

Yokogawa releases new Centum VP 5, aims at improving the use of plant information and reducing lifecycle costs with simplified engineering.

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Yokogawa Electric Corporation has released Centum VP version 5, its flagship integrated production control system and foundation of its Vigilant Plant program. Developed with the aim of bringing companies operational excellence through the use of field digital technology, Yokogawa says it will continue to provide solutions that help customers’ plants achieve operational excellence, with an eye on becoming the leading company in the industrial automation business.

The company points out that field digital technology has been introduced in many industries and is helping to increase maintenance efficiency in manufacturing plants. Yokogawa started its main developments in that area when it first released Foundation fieldbus compliant products in 1998, and has participated in defining international standards for fieldbus networking that reduce the need for field wiring, allow use of intelligent field devices, and improve the management and diagnosis of digital field devices, thus playing an essential role in optimizing plant operations. Advances in field digital technology have led to drastic increases in the volume and variety of field data, and Yokogawa has added developments to help users make better use of this resource.

Control systems must be capable of handling a massive amount of field data at comfortable speeds, and Yokogawa says it has added new capabilities to Centum VP 5 that improve the use of plant information and reduce lifecycle costs with simplified engineering. It will also enable unified plant operations by integrating with many other systems. New features include:

1. New Field Control Station (FCS) featuring four-times the processing performance, twice the application storage capacity, and five-times the control network throughput.

2. Unified Gateway Station (UGS) that improves integration with other systems, allowing Centum VP to control and monitor all the systems at plants, including PLC systems. Despite the differences in such systems, all of their operation windows will have the same look and feel. Operators will now only need to learn how to use the Centum VP HMI, making the overall system easier to operate. In oil and gas fields and other applications where facilities may be scattered over a very wide area, the UGS can establish a link with the small-scale systems (such as utilities) at each site as well as with Yokogawa’s Stardom network-based control system.

3. Enhanced alarm management based on ISA18.2 standard using Yokogawa’s consolidated alarm management software for human interface station (CAMS for HIS). These new functions have been optimized for the management of change process specified in the ISA18.2 standard’s alarm management lifecycle model.

4. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support is included so that customers can reduce the cost of maintaining the PCs connected to their plant networks.

Yokogawa is positioning this product family to expand its base of process control and monitoring in industries such as oil and gas, petrochemicals, chemicals, electric power, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, iron and steel, water supply, and sewage treatment.

www.yokogawa.com/us

Edited by Peter Welander, pwelander(at)cfemedia.com

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