OREANDA-NEWS.  February 21, 2012. Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it plans to release an enhanced version of the CENTUM® VP integrated production control system, the company's flagship product, in March.

In this new version, support for the use of a dual-redundant unified gateway station (UGS), which serves as the interface between CENTUM VP and other control systems, has been added. In addition, an alarm monitoring function is provided for the display of alarm information from other control systems on the CENTUM VP human machine interface (HMI).
Development Background

Throughout the oil, chemical, and iron and steel industries, distributed control systems (DCSs), programmable controllers (PLCs), and other types of control systems from a variety of companies are used to control electric power, wastewater treatment, shipping, and other auxiliary facilities as well as the main manufacturing process itself. By monitoring all of these control systems from CENTUM VP that handles the main process, plant efficiency can be improved.

Plant monitoring and control functions are usually designed to be dual redundant so that an automatic switchover to a backup unit can be initiated in the event of a system failure. Although the gateway unit that serves as the interface for the monitoring of other control systems from the main process DCS should also be dual redundant, systems with this feature have not been widely adopted because of the requirement for special software.
Product Features
Dual-redundant UGS support
With the addition of support for dual-redundant UGSs that serve as the interface between CENTUM VP and other control systems, only simple programming is required to build a highly reliable system with an additional UGS.
Integrated alarm monitoring function
In addition to main process alarms, alarms from other control systems can be displayed on the CENTUM VP HMI via an OPC-A&E*1 server. OPC-A&E is an industry specification for control system alarms and events

Nobuaki Konishi, Vice President and Head of the IA Systems Business Headquarters, comments as follows: "To achieve integrated plant monitoring and control by a DCS, gateway functions must be highly reliable. This has been accomplished with our development of a dual-redundant UGS, enabling for the upstream market the integrated monitoring of offshore platforms and widely distributed facilities such as oil and gas wells. I believe this enhanced UGS will help customers improve production efficiency."