Yokogawa Announces New DCS

New Yokogawa Electric President and COO, Shuzo Kaihori, announced the introduction of a new generation DCS product at the ARC forum in Orlando, Fla., this afternoon. Called CentumVP, it is the replacement for the 3000. According to Satoru Kurosu, senior vice president Industrial Automation, VP stands for VigilantPlant--Yokogawa's vision of creating Drucker's well-managed plant (quiet and boring). There are still gaps, Kurosu said, and Boomers are retiring, taking their knowledge with them. CentumVP is intended to fill those gaps, according to Kurosu. CentumVP will enable agile plant production, Kurosu said, by closing the gaps and breaking down barriers within the plant and between the plant and the enterprise. CentumVP is a multiple plant DCS. Using the NAM joint venture as an example, Kurosu talked about "Tom, the human gap filler." NAM asked Yokogawa for better integration tools. In current design DCS/plant systems, there are multiple realtime databases. What CentumVP does, according to Kurosu, creates a single, realtime database instead. The next phase will liberate this database. The first product for CentumVP is the HMI, which runs on both WinXP and Windows Vista. Ergonomic design, with intuitive navigation and consolidated alarm management, multiple tabbed views, favorites ,and history windows plus custom saved view sets almost doubles speed of decision making and reduced by half the time necessary for corrective action, according to Kurosu. First products will be out in first quarter 2008. All of these new products will be easily migratable to from any existing Centum product.