Process visualisation software adds new views

A Siemens Automation and Drives product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jan 24, 2007

Siemens Automation and Drives has extended its popular Simatic WinCC process visualisation series by introducing Version 6.2.

Siemens Automation and Drives has extended its popular Simatic WinCC process visualisation series by introducing Version 6.2.

The new version is not only more user-friendly but now comes with additional display functions for messages and curves.

Simatic WinCC V6.2 also features greater database capacity plus a series of new options.

As a result, WinCC can now also be used as a Simatic Maintenance Station for efficient plant maintenance.

With Simatic WinCC V6.2, planning engineers can now integrate Windows objects in the visualisation interface of the runtime application, allowing plant controllers to use familiar on-screen Windows elements such as menus, toolbars, software buttons and combination dialog boxes.

The new "alarm hiding" function can be used to suppress unimportant status messages displayed on screen but the messages continue to be archived in the background.

In addition, the new WinCC Trend Controls enable current values and historical process values to be displayed on the same curve for purposes of clarity - for example, it is possible to display only the y-axis of the selected curve.

The new WinCC option, Simatic Maintenance Station, has been designed to help maintenance engineers.

The software is installed at the same time as the basic WinCC system so that the operator can easily switch between process visualisation and maintenance.

It is especially easy to configure the Maintenance Station.

The user only has to select the automation systems to be mapped in the Step 7 engineering tool; the Maintenance Station then recognises the equipment belonging to the plant and automatically creates a hierarchically structured maintenance image based on overlapping WinCC windows.

During operation, the Maintenance Station shows all the automation components relevant to maintenance - such as control units, switchgear and drives - and also monitors the current status of the plant.

It is not only possible to plan the reaction to faults but also to plan suitable maintenance measures in advance in order to make efficient use of existing maintenance resources.

Due to integration of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in Simatic WinCC V6.2, the database capacity has been improved.

As a result, a "central archive server" can now be set up for purposes of central process data archiving, whereby any Windows computer can be configured with the WinCC/Connectivity Station option for access to all the WinCC archives.

There are two new WinCC options.

A project version numbering tool which can be used to manage project versions has been added to WinCC/Audit.

A new feature is WinCC/ChangeControl for back-trackable project management and version numbering.

With WinCC/Redundancy, message acknowledgements, signal comments and states as well as internal variables can be compared with and matched to each other in setups where redundant WinCC stations are used.

Finally, in the case of the WinCC/Web Navigator, the web clients are integrated in the central, plant-wide user administration system with Simatic Logon.

This meets the high requirements of the pharmaceutical and food industries for a back-tracking capability.