2005 Press Releases-05

Yokogawa Electric Corporation has developed Release 3.06 of the CENTUM CS 3000 R3 Integrated Production Control System (hereafter CS 3000). Featuring improved integration with safety systems and other production control systems, this CS 3000 upgrade will be released to the market on February 18. The CS 3000 production control system is widely used by plants both large and small in process-oriented industries such as petroleum, petrochemicals, natural gas, chemicals, pulp and paper, food processing, and water treatment.

Development Background
The CS 3000 is a core building block of Yokogawa’s VigilantPlant™ solutions that promise to bring operational excellence to visionary plants, creating an environment where plant personnel can “See Clearly, Know in Advance, and Act with Agility.” Release 3.06 enables operational excellence by plant-wide monitoring and seamless integration with Yokogawa’s new safety system.
  Core concepts in the development of the CS 3000 have been the continual adoption of new functions with assured continuity and the simultaneous pursuit of openness and reliability. The CS 3000 is the product of improvements that are finely calibrated to customer needs and the steady development and introduction of new cutting-edge technologies.
  This CS 3000 upgrade adheres to this fundamental approach. Its system integration functions have been upgraded in response to users’ need for improved integration with safety systems and other control systems. 
  By strengthening its solutions for customers with continuous evolution of the world-leading CS 3000, Yokogawa aims to win the number one position in the global industrial automation business by the year 2010.

Product Features
1. Integration with the ProSafe-RS Safety System
Yokogawa has developed a platform that integrates the CS 3000 with its latest safety system, the ProSafe-RS, which was released on February 2. This platform enables the integrated display of CS 3000 and ProSafe-RS process data and event messages on the CS 3000’s operations and monitoring station, thereby improving operating and monitoring efficiency. In addition, system configuration costs have been reduced and maintenance efficiency improved by unifying the control network.

2. Development of System Integration OPC Station (SIOS)
Yokogawa has developed a SIOS gateway function for the CS 3000 that enables the monitoring of process data and event messages from other control systems. Because it uses the industry-standard OPC interface*, it is possible to connect with other manufacturer’s production control systems without adding significantly to the engineering work required for tasks such as the configuration of data integration. For example, the operator of a CS 3000 controlling a plant’s upstream operations can now use this system to monitor downstream operations that are controlled by another control system.

* OPC interface: OPC stands for Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control. This is a standard interface for developing measurement and control systems which uses object-linking technology developed by Microsoft. It enables data interoperability between systems from different manufacturers. An American non-profit organization called the OPC Foundation is dedicated to promoting and popularizing use of the OPC interface. Yokogawa participates in the management of this body, as a member of the OPC Foundation’s board of directors.

3. Integration with the CENTUM CS 1000
It is now possible to use a CENTUM CS 1000 (hereafter CS 1000), which is intended for small- and medium-sized plants, as a CS 3000 without making any modification or addition of hardware. When expanding the production capacity of a plant to a level where control is no longer possible with the CS 1000,  it is possible to control the upscaled plant by expanding the functions of the existing CS 1000 to the CS 3000 level. In addition for plants which have both CS 3000 and CS 1000 production control systems, it is possible to carry out engineering works and to operate and monitor the entire plant from the CS 3000.

Yokogawa's Approach Toward This Field
Yokogawa introduced the world’s first distributed control system (DCS) to the market in 1975. With their ability to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, DCSs were rapidly deployed throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, and to date Yokogawa has supplied more than 16,000 such systems worldwide. The time has come to begin replacing the DCSs that were introduced in the early period and it is expected that the need to replace these systems will grow for several years to come.
  Through its nonstop efforts to develop and ensure for its customers a stable supply of new products that feature superior cutting-edge technologies, Yokogawa is developing the CENTUM series into a leading brand worldwide.