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GE Fanuc launches Proficy Cimplicity 7.5

04/03/2008

Charlottesville, Va., April 3 -- GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, today announced the latest version of its supervisory control solution, Proficy HMI/SCADA - Cimplicity 7.5.

“Cimplicity 7.5 extends the product’s ability to develop and improve supervisory monitoring and control projects,” said Gimmi Filice, Cimplicity product manager for GE Fanuc. “Whether upgrading an existing system or implementing a new project, Cimplicity 7.5 will provide users with the power, flexibility and ease of use they need.”

Some of the notable enhancements are digital graphical replay (DGR), enhanced screen navigation, and easy-to-use application deployment.

The DGR allows users to go back in time and replay Cimplicity screens based on logged historical data. Events can be replayed in real time, slow motion or fast forward to analyze systems leading up to alarms and troubleshoot or optimize applications. DGR is essential for unmanned operations and for improving applications.

A new timesaving capability for developers and operators is the new screen navigation bar. Frequently, HMI/SCADA developers add a method of navigation to their application, requiring them to build buttons or frames containing links to other screens. Cimplicity 7.5 has now made configuring navigation as simple as drag and drop. By simply dragging screens into a hierarchy, users can easily build a task bar menu with options to color code and have other attributes, so that operators can locate screens quickly and make them more effective.

To facilitate time-consuming deployment of changes in large applications, Cimplicity now contains an application deployment system to allow development changes to be propagated automatically to all the viewers in the system, helping reduce total cost of ownership. By configuring when and how to deploy the changes, viewers will then detect changes, copy the necessary files and alert the operator that changes are coming that can be deferred if needed, or configured to force the change.

Other key features include:
• Advanced Viewer -- In addition to the standard client/server architecture in Cimplicity, the new advanced viewer gives even more flexibility for how to architect a system. The advanced viewer allows users to visualize data captured by the server just like the standard viewer, with the option of capturing data directly from OPC DA servers locally or on the network. Often applications need simple enhancements or the ability to grab a piece of information local to the viewer. Rather than going to the server and configuring a data point to make the data available to the viewer, the viewer can access the OPC data directly. This provides flexibility in architecture, and the ability to enhance the local application without modifying the server.
• Windows Domain Security -- With the growing need for securing HMI/SCADA systems and the increased dependence on IT standards, Cimplicity has added Windows Domain Security integration. This allows users to take advantage of current IT configurations, so that they can assign roles and resources in Cimplicity based on Windows groups. Cimplicity will use the configured Windows domain to authenticate user credentials and the IT rules that come with it for password expiration, rules and more.
• Historian Integration Enhancements -- With the release of Cimplicity 7.5, GE Fanuc continues to increase the value of the combined Cimplicity and Proficy Historian solution. Enhancements to the integration allow users to log alarm data to Historian in addition to data that was already logged there. Additional flexibility allows configuration of the system to log to SQL historian or both, or split up the data and alarm logs.

According to GE Fanuc’s Filice, “This new release will offer our customers additional diagnostic tools to help improve existing manufacturing and plant processes, as well as productivity tools to help reduce the time to create new applications.”