To remain competitive in today’s global marketplace, decision-makers need the right information in the right place and at the right time. Rockwell Automation’s ViewAnyWare strategy is offering a way to get the necessary information where and when it is needed. This means that while working with machine-level interface devices and supervisory-level HMI devices, there are no gaps in products, platforms, or software.
To support Rockwell Automation's ViewAnyWare strategy, Rockwell Software has introduced the RSView Enterprise Series. This series serves as the software foundation for all of the ViewAnyWare products. Based on Rockwell Software's scalable architecture, the Enterprise Series makes effective use of both open and embedded technologies to support both distributed and standalone applications. The goal of the RSView Enterprise Series, consistent with the ViewAnyWare strategy, is to provide a common development environment, application re-use, and an integrated architecture so users can increase productivity, reduce operation costs, and improve quality.
RSView Studio provides a common user experience from machine level to supervisory level to simplify development, deployment, training, and maintenance. Entire machine-level applications can be migrated to supervisory-level applications, or single components of an application may be re-used by simply dragging and dropping the components between applications. In the future, users will be able to migrate supervisory-level applications to machine-level applications.
The RSView Enterprise Series also provides 'preferred connectivity' with Rockwell Automation products via FactoryTalk. FactoryTalk is Rockwell Automation's initiative to provide an unmatched level of interoperability among its products. Rockwell provides a common infrastructure by which products can share information, features and behaviours across a range of Rockwell Automation products to make it easier, faster, and less expensive for customers to design, operate, and maintain automation solutions.
RSVIEW Machine Edition
RSView Machine Edition is a machine-level HMI that supports both open and embedded operator interface solutions for monitoring and controlling individual machines or small processes. RSView Machine Edition allows for a consistent operator interface across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Windows CE and Windows 2000 solutions. Components of this new HMI are a PC-based development tool called RSView Studio, and a separate runtime system called
RSView ME Station
RSView Machine Edition features include:
* Full-featured Graphics Editor with powerful editing tools, drawing objects, and animation capabilities.
* Graphics library with hundreds of graphic objects for users to drag and drop into their displays.
* Object explorer to quickly view the hierarchy of objects on a display.
* Property panel to easily edit the attributes of single or multiple objects.
* Quick test run, which simulates individual displays or entire projects.
* Full complement of operator devices including push buttons, selectors, numeric and string entry devices, diagnostic indicators, message displays, numeric and string displays, bar graphs, gauges, and much more.
* Trending to monitor realtime and historical data.
* Data logging to log tag values that can be displayed in the historical trend object.
* Alarming to quickly alert operators to conditions requiring immediate action.
* Security to restrict operator access to specific displays.
* Expressions to perform mathematical or logical calculations.
* Support for both OPC and ActiveX Technologies.
The RSView Studio development system allows the user to create powerful graphic displays that give a visual representation of their process. These displays also allow operators to directly interact with that process. Designed for the Windows 2000 operating system, RSView Studio provides an easy-to-use development environment to simplify application design and reduce development time.
RSView machine edition offers flexible communication options to capture, control and convey plant floor data including both single (point to point) and fully networked connections. For the most demanding applications, RSView machine edition may be configured to communicate on multiple networks simultaneously. Up to four channels are supported.
Networks supported on the RAC6182 industrial computers include Ethernet, DH+, DF1 and DH-485. On Windows 2000 platforms, RSView Machine Edition and RSLinx provide a powerful combination of connectivity options including Ethernet, ControlNet, DH+, DF1 and DH-485.
RSView machine edition also supports OPC standard communications allowing connectivity to a wide range of Rockwell Automation and third-party devices.
RSVIEW supervisory edition - an HMI for supervisory-level monitoring and control applications, it has a distributed and scalable architecture that supports multiserver/multiclient applications, giving maximum control over information wherever it is needed... and only where requested. This highly scalable architecture can be applied to a standalone one-server/one-client application or to multiple clients interfacing with multiple servers.
System applications are developed with RSView Studio, a common development and testing environment for all RSView enterprise series products. RSView studio supports editing and reuse of RSView machine edition and RSView supervisory edition projects for portability between embedded machine and supervisory HMI systems, reducing development time, engineering costs, and training costs.
RSView studio also permits the remote configuration of user's applications. RSView supervisory edition editing environment allows application development across multiple servers from a single location. It also gives multiple developers access to the same project at the same time.
Taking advantage of preferred connectivity
RSView supervisory edition (SE) lets the user take advantage of seamless interoperability among Rockwell products with FactoryTalk architecture. FactoryTalk provides the infrastructure RSView SE needs to access information directly from FactoryTalk servers, like ControlLogix and A-B PLCs, as well as standard third-party OPC Servers. So, with FactoryTalk, the user defines their tags only once. RSView SE uses the tags created in the user's logic program, eliminating the need to recreate them within the RSView SE application. Changes to tags in the user's data server are inherited by their HMI application.
RSView SE's architecture gives maximum flexibility in designing, deploying, and maintaining a system. The FactoryTalk directory maps all of the tags from the controllers to the parts of RSView SE that use them. When something about the tag changes, FactoryTalk takes care of making sure that information gets into RSView SE. So with RSView, if a user wants to move a controller in their system from one place to another or move a tag from one controller to another, there is no need to re-map tags from the HMI to that controller. FactoryTalk performs this task for the user. Copy and paste functions may be used to move or alter entire areas of an application without the user having to make changes to their HMI.
Since each RSView SE client can view information from any and all RSView SE Servers, the user only the gets information they need. While operators are viewing information pertinent to their areas of the process, supervisors and executives are viewing the information they need to make important decisions.
And now the user can customise each of their clients even further through 'display code' or client side VBA for graphics and the exposed graphics object model. Clients act like VB forms, allowing them to execute client-side VBA code locally - independently of other clients.
Clients will continue to update and operate seamlessly, even if RSView SE loses communication with the user's RSLinx or OPC data server. RSView SE can support the user's redundant data server configuration by switching to a backup server. Since RSView SE uses Windows security, users and groups may be set up in Windows, and then rights granted to those same users and groups in Supervisory Edition.
Core HMI features
RSView SE provides core features such as a full-featured graphics editor with powerful editing tools, global alarming, activity and alarm logging, TrendX trending, and more.
For more information contact Jeff Sandison, Rockwell Automation, 011 654 9700, [email protected], www.rockwellautomation.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 654 9700 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.rockwellautomation.co.za |
| Articles: | More information and articles about Rockwell Automation |
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version