Yokogawa Releases FAST/TOOLS R10.01 Web-based Enterprise Operations Solution

Tokyo, Japan - December 17, 2013

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the release of FAST/TOOLS^® R10.01 - the latest version of a web-based real-time operations management and visualization software package that brings revolutionary changes to real-time process information intelligence. This enterprise operations solution introduces breakthrough architectural features that significantly enhance efficiency and security and improve the operational agility of remote process management infrastructure.

FAST/TOOLS^® R10.01

Development Background

The enterprise operations and supervisory solutions market continues to grow, and a number of market research reports have identified increasing demand for the integration of various disciplines and functions that deliver operator-centric information solutions.

The introduction of more smart devices, with 200 parameters per device now the norm, and the current trend toward consolidating operations across dispersed assets over large geographical areas, has resulted in mind boggling quantities of data. Some striking numbers emerge: only 5% of this data is transferred into meaningful information, only 10% is relationally structured, and more than 50% is poor in quality. To really capitalize on the extensive data that is gathered, customers need to think about their information strategy. The requirements for an enterprise-wide operations management solution are driving the need for collaboration and information sharing across different platforms, systems, geographies, and corporate networks. This aims to provide the opportunity, with the underlying technology and network, to seamlessly connect devices and applications, while managing them as a single system from an operations, engineering, and maintenance point of view.

Recognizing that most enterprises will take a hybrid approach to management and control solutions, Yokogawa wants to help customers utilize their application investments and transform data into meaningful information by providing a transparent environment which can integrate multi-tier architectures and a variety of sources that can be accessed and shared globally.

Main Features

1. Enabling the adoption of enterprise solutions
   To help build process information infrastructure that delivers continuous services and applications across several enterprise levels, this new solution empowers companies to create enterprise-wide information management centers without boundaries using FAST/TOOLS for high-scale deployment. Multiple layers can be used within a single organization, with organic data exchange between these layers. An enterprise operation module is responsible for gathering the data across several levels on different servers and allows for supervision at the upper layer single operator console. For this the system establishes the optimal path for accessing data that is to be presented to the user. It tries to find alternative paths to the data if access to a certain server is temporarily interrupted. A rule based authorization model authorizes a user to perform certain operational tasks, with an enterprise user being able to obtain information from multiple servers and a local user obtaining data from a local server. Template based graphics and object oriented structures can have local or enterprise properties, eliminating the need for time consuming distribution mechanisms.
2. Information model (process hierarchy)
   The requirements for enterprise-wide process automation solutions are driving the need for any-to-any "collaboration" across different platforms, geographies, and corporate networks. To make sense out of the ever increasing volume of data, Yokogawa has implemented an "information model" to allow for process hierarchies. This means that multilevel namespaces can be created on both items and objects up to 128 levels, and up to 255 characters, e.g. "Country.Region.BusinessUnit.Area.Section.Unit. …… Tag (item)." Each namespace can be used as a grouping for other entity types. This means, for example, that at the process unit level, an oil well can be defined. At the area level, an accumulator can be defined that accumulates all the oil production of the area. And at the business unit level, an accumulator can be defined that accumulates all oil production of the area level accumulators.
3. New RDBMS interfaces to the enterprise environment
   As part of its vision to help more people unlock actionable insights from big data, Yokogawa released an embedded RDBMS engine. This allows customers to perform more complex queries that cross-section FAST/TOOLS data and integrate that data into their own Microsoft SQL^®, ORACLE^® like environments. For big data analytics and fast insights, this has advantages over traditional methods. Data that needs to be exposed to foreign databases is first mapped to local database tables, thereby offloading the supervisory control system, and the shape of these (pre-defined) tables can be defined (modified) at engineering time, ensuring that only relevant data is exposed to the customer's database in a way that best suits the application. The new RDBMS engine contains a "distributor" module that runs on the same machine as the customer's database and provides an interface to the mapped tables, allowing them to be used as "linked server" tables in the customer's RDBMS system. This method improves data integration by allowing these tables to be queried and reported in the same way as native tables. Yokogawa also works with virtual environments to give customers built-in cloud backup and disaster recovery in this area.
4. Wireless mobility solution enhancements
   Wireless is the next step towards the deployment of standard IT solutions in the world of management and process control. By bringing down the walls of traditional information gathering and delivery, this mobility is game changing. The use of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones is an integral part of Yokogawa's information technology infrastructure. It enables organizations to measure and share context-based information anytime, anywhere, providing real-time insight for the timely localization of incidents and the making of faster and better informed decisions on the go. Delivering on the promise of giving customers access to their information on any device, Yokogawa confirms the availability of new touch-optimized experiences on Android and other device platforms with new input components, alarm widgets and alarm acknowledgement capabilities, trending, reporting, and faceplates.
5. Enhanced ProSafe-RS support for upstream oil and gas applications
   With this new release, it is now possible to easily support gas flow rate calculation functions in the ProSafe-RS safety instrumented system and reporting and data retaining capabilities in FAST/TOOLS. To monitor and control gas wells and pipelines, gas flow rate compensation is required. The in-situ gas volume needs to be compensated to a standard volume because the gas volume rises or falls significantly depending on the process temperature and pressure. This compensation is usually carried out by a control device or dedicated flow computer. For our customers who wish to eliminate the need for such dedicated devices, Yokogawa has incorporated gas flow rate calculation functions, with an easy to navigate parameter settings overview for American Gas Association (AGA) calculation and the ability to create hourly/daily/monthly closing reports on totals/averages/PVs/flow-times, and shut-in times.
6. Distributed temperature sensing and FAST/TOOLS
   Yokogawa sets a new standard in distributed temperature sensing by providing an integrated automation solution based on our DTSX200 distributed temperature sensor and FAST/TOOLS that is designed for oil/gas conventional and unconventional in-well (down-hole) applications, LNG and refinery facilities, pipeline and tank leak detection, and other thermal monitoring applications. With this new release, it is now possible to easily create 3-dimensional data from the DTSX. The temperature for each point along the fiber is measured at each sample interval, which is returned as block data. The advanced trend component can display distance vs. temperature or time vs. temperature, and DTSX sample data integrity is guaranteed by data-buffering capabilities and automatic recovery in the event of a network interrupt.

Vice President Nobuaki Konishi, head of Yokogawa's Industrial Automation Systems Business Division, had the following to say about the new release: "Based on the findings of design workshops with FAST/TOOLS users and developers, Yokogawa has embarked on a new approach to operation management. Version R10.01 offers significant enhancements in operator efficiency and application usability. More task-oriented menus, greater context sensitivity, and improved configuration frameworks will enable our customers to tailor applications that are a good fit with the way they work."

Main Target Markets

Oil and gas upstream/midstream, petrochemicals, chemicals, renewable energy, power, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, food, iron and steel, water supply, wastewater treatment

About FAST/TOOLS

First released in 1978, FAST/TOOLS has evolved from centralized SCADA and HMI software to an enterprise operations environment used by Yokogawa's global network to facilitate supervisory control with customers' systems. This state-of-art industrial software benefits our customers through improved situational awareness visualization, collaboration and decision support, configuration, communication, security, virtualization, deployment, connectivity, mobile solutions, operational alarm management and alarm analysis, and data storage and management. The FAST/TOOLS software suite also provides a high-performance process historian with production history archiving and retrieval, along with a web information service that dramatically simplifies the delivery of operations information.

Yokogawa will continuously improve its entire range of solutions and services, including FAST/TOOLS, with the aim of ensuring safe and highly efficient operations over the entire lifecycle of its customers' facilities.

 

About Yokogawa

Yokogawa's global network of 88 companies spans 55 countries. Founded in 1915, the US$4 billion company conducts cutting-edge research and innovation. Yokogawa is engaged in the industrial automation and control (IA), test and measurement, and other businesses segments. The IA segment plays a vital role in a wide range of industries including oil, chemicals, natural gas, power, iron and steel, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, and food. For more information about Yokogawa, please visit the company's website www.yokogawa.com