Yokogawa releases Centum VP R6.02 integrated production control system

Yokogawa Electric Corporation has released Centum VP R6.02, a new version of its integrated production control system with enhanced functionality.

Yokogawa has developed a number of new operation and monitoring functions for Centum VP, the latest generation in the 40-year-old Centum series, that will make it easier for operators to keep track of what is happening in a plant.

Oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other downstream facilities have numerous suppliers to choose from and must deal with considerable variability in the composition of the raw materials that they receive, necessitating a number of changes to their processes.

Further changes are necessitated by aging facilities and the need to vary production volumes to meet fluctuating demand.

To respond to these challenges and ensure the safe and efficient operation of plant facilities, operators must be able to quickly and thoroughly check many different kinds of data.

Centum VP R6.02 comes with an enhanced real-time trend function for the visualisation of plant operating status.

The system enables operators to perform data checking quickly and thereby keep up with an increasing number of changes in process requirements.

The number of pens that can be checked in a single trend graph has been doubled to 16 and the maximum number of data points that can be displayed for trend graphs has also been doubled to approximately 13,000.

This ensures that operators have all the information needed to stay on top of what is happening in their plants.

In addition to conventional keyboard input, drag-and-drop functionality for the assignment of data to individual pens is supported from operation graphics, alarm lists, and the like.

A new function has been added that displays real-time trend data and past long-term trend data in one continuous line, in the same window, enabling operators to track changes that take place over a longer period of time.

Centum VP has a function that temporarily sets aside, or shelves, less urgent alarm notifications to ensure that operators can respond appropriately to high-priority alarms.

While it is possible to check shelved alarms, the procedure involves several steps and there is a risk that it will not be performed.

With Centum VP R6.02, there is a new list viewer that displays all shelved alarms.

When operators use this together with a suppressed alarm list viewer that was previously released with Centum VP R6.01, there is less risk of such alarms being misplaced or overlooked following a handover.

The system also offers improved integration with the ProSafe-RS R4.01 safety instrumented system, allowing monitoring of the N-IO (Network I/O), a new I/O device that is now available for use with ProSafe-RS R4.01, using the human machine interface (HMI) provided for both systems.

Also, the Automation Design Suite (AD Suite) engineering tool now can save engineering data, manage the engineering history, and support I/O design for both the process control instrumentation and the safety instrumentation.

This improved integration results in enhanced engineering efficiency throughout the entire plant lifecycle, Yokogawa says.

The Centum VP system is aimed for use in process industries such as oil and natural gas, petrochemicals, chemicals, electric power, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, foods, iron and steel, and water and wastewater.