Yokogawa reveals the next step

A significant milestone in Yokogawa’s history of technological innovation. So said Dr Tony Lee, Managing Director, Yokogawa Engineering Asia, kicking off the February 5 launch event in Singapore for the company’s new integrated production control system, CENTUM VP. Illustrating the importance that Yokogawa is attaching to the release of the eighth generation of CENTUM, which was first revealed back in 1975 as the world’s first distributed control system (DCS), the company carried out a nearsimultaneous global announcement, with events also taking place in Orlando and Amsterdam.

In Singapore, the major regional base for Yokogawa, key customers from the company’s process industry client base attended the launch together with representatives from various Asia Pacific media organizations.

The VP in CENTUM VP stands for VigilantPlant, Yokogawa’s automation concept for safe, reliable, and profitable plant operations that was launched in 2005 with Safety Excellence solutions. Asset Excellence and Production Excellence solutions followed in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and CENTUM VP takes the VigilantPlant initiative to its next evolutionary step, says Yokogawa, integrating the three excellence solutions into one Operational Excellence platform.

Getting integrated
The key elements of the new system: a radically redesigned, intuitive HMI; a unified architecture based on a single realtime plant database; and the guarantee of compatibility with all previous CENTUM series releases.

The CENTUM VP HMI, which comprises the first stage of new release, offers integrated viewing and data handling functions whereby, for example, process alarms, history data, faceplates can all be presented in windows on the same operator screen.

According to Yokogawa, such a unified and intuitive HMI environment is essential for harnessing the power of the integrated production control system. It also ensures that information users get prioritized, actionable information instead of a flooding of data.

S cheduled to be incorporated in the next release stage by next year is the unified architecture. Here, a single database serves all the key plant functions, such as production control, asset management, and operation support. These have traditionally been the domain of disparate systems, leaving gaps and barriers that constrain smooth and integrated operations.

“Our concept is true integration,” said Masatoshi Nakahara, Vice President, Industrial Automation Systems, and leader of the R&D effort for CENTUM VP, when he spoke to CE Asia. “Instead of having multiple systems, data should be integrated to improve plant operations.”

With the unified architecture approach, CENTUM VP promises quick and flexible deployment of applications to enable the user to improve the safety, ava i l a b i l i t y, and profitability of a plant. Change management is also simplified, thereby minimizing lifecycle ownership cost.

To ensure investment protection for its existing installed base, CENTUM VP is fully backward compatible with CENTUM CS 1000 and CS 3000 systems and allows for a smooth migration path to all previous CENTUM series DCSs, says Yokogawa.

Positive feedback
During the rest of 2008 Yokogawa will be accelerating its marketing efforts for CENTUM VP via user group meetings and tradeshows like Gastech and Hannover. The company is also looking to trial the system at a number of sites in Asia.

“We have already made presentations to some of our major customers and they are very excited by what they have seen so far,” Shin Banno, Planning Group Manager, told CE Asia. “And we also hope that CENTUM VP will allow us to win over new customers, especially in Europe and the US.”

Good initial feedback has also come from ARC Advisory Group: “CENTUM CS 3000 was due for an evolutionary leap and this looks to be a well thought out approach. The new HMI looks very good, and Yokogawa has clearly done a lot of work in researching how to make visualization better for the end user, The new system should go a long way in realizing Yokogawa’s aggressive goals for expansion in the Americas and worldwide.”