New Alarms Management, Enhanced Situational Awareness
ISA 18.2 Alarm Management Standard
The ISA 18.2 Alarm Management Standard outlines best practices to help your SCADA team develop an effective and sustainable alarms management strategy. VTScada 11.2 includes new and augmented tools to help you easily put that strategy into motion.
Enhanced Situational Awareness
Version 11.2 makes it easy for operators to instantly identify the status and priority of each alarm in the list.
- Use a combination of text, symbols, color, and sound to best meet the visual needs of your team. (e.g., color vision deficiency)
- Provide important context by adding encrypted operator notes to alarms.
- New ‘Alarm Details’ dialog provides a complete overview of each alarm’s configuration, history, and notes.
Eliminating Nuisance Alarms
Shelving allows operators to temporarily silence and hide unhelpful alarms while still recording them in the alarm history. VTScada 11.2 conforms to the ISA 18.2 concept of shelved alarms.
- Set shelved alarms to re-arm after a defined period.
- Easily display a list of shelved alarms in the Alarm Page.
- New ‘Bad Actors’ and ‘Alarm Flood’ reports identify chronic alarms so that they can be resolved.
Multi Plant Architecture Enables Centralized Management and Autonomous Operations
Now configure multiple alarm databases to segregate plants and processes for faster alarm processing within each segment.
- New VTScada applications include separate alarm and event databases. Existing applications are automatically converted.
- The Alarm Database Tag allows you to add more databases as required and synchronize them across a network.
- Easily filter the Alarm Page on any networked workstation to display lists from one or all of them.
- Locally stored databases allow operators to manage and modify alarms even when disconnected from alarm servers.
- Synchronized distributed databases keep your priceless alarm and event history safe and up-to-date.
More Alarm Tools
- More easily search and sort your alarms and events in the alarm list.
- Require operators to add notes when acknowledging, shelving or un-shelving alarms.
- Easily adjust text and row size for optimal viewing on specific monitors.
- Reduce eyestrain by toggling between daytime and nighttime views of the Alarm Page.
- Tag types with built-in alarms now use consistent configuration dialogs for enabling/disabling alarms based on I/O.
- When configuring rosters, you can only select callout methods where the required device is configured.
Enhanced ‘Anywhere’ Thin Client
VTScada has always been a leader in thin client technology with options to best suit the screen size and bandwidth of your devices.
The new ‘Anywhere Client’ provides a consistent and secure full workstation experience on modern computers, phones, and tablets.
- Monitor and control your applications in any HTML5 browser.
- Event-driven execution provides real-time data without overloading your data plan.
- Zero-footprint means nothing to download and install. No Java either.
- Easily switch between the Anywhere Client, the VIC, or the MIC. WAP is discontinued.
New High Performance and High Impact Graphics
The Idea Studio includes more drag-and-drop elements to help you create outstanding displays regardless of your design philosophy.
- New photo-real meters including a thermometer.
- New and updated custom meter parts.
- New rectangle shape with adjustable rounded corners.
- Expanded grey-scale image libraries for visually muted displays.
VTScada Transaction Logging
The new VTScada Transaction Logger records a collection of summary values representing a transaction, such as batch data, material-handling operations, or bulk gas and liquid transfers.
Faster Across the Board
In version 11.2 we tuned the powerful VTScada engine to increase performance for applications of any size.
- Faster VIC and Anywhere thin client connections.
- Up to 100 times faster historical data reads.
- Faster alarm and page updates.
- Faster startup and shutdown for large applications.
- Rockwell CIP Ethernet IP driver is up to 7 times faster.
- Faster script code execution.
New and Augmented Drivers
Enhanced Rockwell CIP Driver – It’s faster, requires less bandwidth, and is easier to configure thanks to a built-in PLC tag browser.
New Built-in I/O Drivers – Campbell Scientific PakBus®, Campbell Scientific PakBus RF Link®, Campbell Scientific RTU®, Enron Modbus®, GE Series 90®, Koyo®, NMEA, Omron FINS®, ROC®, and SQL Data Query.
More Ease-of-Use Features
Operational Polling Control – ‘Enable Polling Checkbox’ & ‘Toggle Polling Button’ widgets start/stop polling without configuration privileges.
Set Default Zoom For Map Sites – Set the default zoom level for tags displayed on maps (e.g., Context types, Polling Driver, Data Flow RTU drivers, and Station tags). Open a map to show as much or as little of the surroundings as you want.
Hide Running Applications – Only authorized users may reveal the user interface. Useful for managing hosted systems.
More Help – Now, it’s even easier to find the topics you need. Add your own topics and link them to pages and tags in your application.
