CENTUM Replay

Creating the fundamentals for a learning organisation

Challenge

In a competitive environment, the lack of skilled and experienced operators is a critical issue – the need to analyse operational activities and corresponding process conditions to increase performance becomes a regular topic.

Agile and cost-effective solutions to analyse past operations, share operational knowledge and train operators on best practices will be a key differentiator to increase the competitiveness of a customer’s site, especially in regions where skilled manpower is very expensive and rare.

The solution

Yokogawa is pleased to present CENTUM Replay, a solution that aims to address these concerns at a “low cost” of ownership.

Interactive "Replay" of recorded operations, adding comments and allowing users to navigate through the process graphics. This solution will allow users to conduct an efficient operational analysis (RCA, Root Cause Analysis) and to easily build a knowledge database containing operational responses to interesting events (e.g. process start-up, shutdown, transient operations, etc.). In this way, CENTUM Replay provides you with a platform for retaining operational knowledge and for sharing the knowledge easily within your organisation.

How does it work?

When the plant is operated, CENTUM Replay keeps automatically recording the process data and the operator’s actions. While using CENTUM Replay, the user is able to select a timeframe from past operations and to play back the plant conditions.

This enables the user to easily repeat and explore the historical operations and corresponding process behaviour using all the available CENTUM process graphics, just by playing forward the recordings.

When an interesting operational event is recognised by the operators, CENTUM Replay will provide functionality to store this permanently as a session.
The user can add dynamically updated guidance comments in the session:

• to provide additional description to what is happening at the timeline of playback
• or to open automatically different process graphics to highlight important process behaviours.

In this way, CENTUM Replay acts as a knowledge-based management platform, where actual operations can be analysed, retained and easily shared within your organisation for future training sessions and references.

Yokogawa, in collaboration with Air Liquide, has developed a new solution to dynamically play back past operations in a data-driven CENTUM environment. The new CENTUM Replay creates recordings of past operations and, while playing back these recordings, it allows navigation through all available process graphics. Additionally it provides functionality to add interactive comments to these sessions. CENTUM Replay has proved to be an invaluable solution for root cause analysis and provides a new perspective for operators’ training.

Benefits

• Agile way of transforming operating experience into a long-term asset
• Low cost of ownership, low maintenance
• Easily prepared training sessions based on actual plant data
• Effective solution for accelerating time-consuming Root Cause Analysis
• Re-use of existing CENTUM VP graphics
• Expandable with more (offline) stations
• Simple deployment

System Architecture

• CENTUM Replay in online configuration: is capable of collecting data and playing back the past operation. This machine needs to be connected to the control system (L2) network.
• CENTUM Replay in offline configuration: optional licence, capable of playing back the sessions created by the online version. This machine is not bound to the control system network and can be used anywhere.