Applications

Unit Level Advanced HMI 
IntelliMAX Plant simple yet powerful deployment fits well into unit HMI applications. Each unit server will have in integrated advanced historian and reporting module. “Operate Anywhere – Engineer Anywhere” design allows an operator to monitor critical data from other units with no integration overhead. Units may be monitored at the main control room again without any integration overhead. Current alarms from one unit may be integrated into another unit in a plug-n-play manner. This plug-n-play functionality also includes historical alarm/event access as well as historical trend data. Real time data from any of the unit servers may also be integrated into other unit servers in the same manner. Each unit server resource may be browsed from another server and integrated with a few mouse clicks. Most of this entire integration configuration can be performed from any station on the LAN. IntelliMAX Plant servers may be deployed in a simplex or fault-tolerant configuration.

Plant Level Operator Console
At plant level the main concern typically is data loading and system performance. With IntelliMAX you can rest assured that your complete plant data may effectively integrated into a unified plant application without any performance compromise. Each IntelliMAX server is capable of handling 100K plus tags. All modules including graphics, alarm generation, alarm/event logging, trend historian will manage not just data bursts of thousands of tag value changes per second but data avalanches of tens of thousand tag value changes per second. All this is done without any data loss. IntelliMAX preferred implementation philosophy is to minimize re-integration effort and unnecessary data replication. For large plants with multiple IntelliMAX unit servers the key is seamless access of every unit server resource at any of the central operation stations. These include graphic screens, current alarms, real time trends, history alarms/events, history trends or any other operator function available at the unit level. Real-Time SOA architecture allows server data to be made available on demand without any need for integration engineering or data replication. For backup and redundancy purpose plant/enterprise level historian databases may be maintained for historical alarms/events and trend data. IntelliMAX Plant servers may be deployed in a simplex or fault-tolerant configuration.

DCS Operator Station Alternate
Market dynamics indicate that DCS vendors enjoy unprecedented levels of end-user influence. The DCS has become the default operator interface for mid sized and large process facilities as well as some SCADA applications. It is not uncommon to see number of DCS operator station licenses at one facility to be in the range or 10 or more and in some cases as many as 30. A keen analysis is required to evaluate the efficiency of this architecture and the value proposition or lack there of. Typical process plants have 50% to 80% of the plant I/O originating outside the core DCS process control system (PCS). The non-PCS data would include systems including:

• Packaged process equipment such a rotating equipment 
• Safety shutdown systems
• Fire&Gas systems
• Motor control centers
• Power distribution and management systems
• Analyzer systems
• Vibration/condition monitoring systems
• Tank gauging systems
• Balance of plant process areas such as water/waste water and power generation

The negative impact of non-PCS data integration into the DCS must be assessed. This includes:

Prohibitively high cost of integrating serial/soft I/O into PCS controllers. This is often done using Modbus serial, Modbus TCP, AB TCP, Profibus or other such networks. The main drawbacks to this approach are:  

• Each PCS 3rd party communication module has limited bandwidth resulting in use of a large number of these modules
• The PCS controller can only support a limited number of such communication modules forcing number of controllers to increase substantially. This increase further negatively impacts the load on the control LAN as well as adds to license costs at every level.
• The real impact of this integration however is at the PCS controller software configuration level. For every alarm point from the 3rd party communication a DCS alarm “shadow” block must be configured. Not to mention that this consumes the limited number of alarm blocks allowed in the PCS system.
• Even for non-alarm points mapping has to be done to PCS blocks to allow useful functionality.
• Redundancy for such 3rd party communication means double the cost of hardware and more complicated licensing.

Many DCS vendors have now come up with 3rd party PC gateways for bulk data input. Major drawbacks of this approach are:

• Firstly the license costs for such stations remain very high.
• Redundancy is hard to implement and costly.
• The workload regarding software integration in terms of “shadow” blocks remains the same.

The above is only a limited assessment of the negative aspects of non-PCS data integration into the DCS system. Further analysis will point to many other aspects including very high risk of implementation due to complexity of architecture, high lifecycle O&M costs associated with hardware/software upgrades. System re-engineering and expansion costs of these systems may also be prohibitive.

IntelliMAX Plant brings tremendous advantages to large process plant integration including:  

• A single ( fault tolerant as required ) IntelliMAX Plant server can integrated tens of thousands of 3rd party real time data over OPC DA client interface.
• MAXObjects based object templates can map 3rd party data in a repeatable and efficient manner with the lowest configuration cost.
• MAXObjects allow automatic tag naming and intelligent referencing to PLC, DCS or other sub-system data. This is the equivalent of what may be called “ integrated database” since it avoids defining data points twice.
• IntelliMAX Plant can recognize alarms generated outside in 3rd party systems without need for “shadow”blocks.
•  IntelliMAX Plant can integrated all 3rd party OPC A&E based alarm and event data in a plug-n-play manner.
• Once data has been pulled into the IntelliMAX Plant server it is available under the “Deploy Once User Anywhere” paradigm providing total flexibility as regards operator and engineer access over plant LAN.
• IntelliMAX Plant provides a much higher level of tag, alarm and general data handling than DCS systems.
• IntelliMAX Plant high integrity and high performance data engines means availability improvement.
• IntelliMAX Plant is 100% OPC standards in every aspect of its operation including alarms and history data.
• IntelliMAX can easily integrate the PCS data over OPC including PCS real time data, PCS alarms and PCS history data.
• IntelliMAX provides a much superiors integration ( ODBC, Web Services ) to other plant or enterprise applications compared to DCS systems.
• IntelliMAX Plant servers may be deployed in a simplex or fault-tolerant configuration.

Plant Supervisory SCADA
In case non-IntelliMAX based unit HMI or DCS solutions have been employed the IntelliMAX Plant still has a place in your plant as an overall supervisory SCADA system. The data integration and data dissemination capabilities of IntelliMAX plant will allow plant supervisors or engineers to have comprehensive real time view of the operations. Remote web access for plant wide data is an obvious additional benefit. DataMAX integrated advanced historian can also be used at the supervisory level as a plant wide main or backup historian. IntelliMAX Plant can also perform the supervisory alarm/evnt management function including alarm/event aggregation, reporting and logging. Conditional and schedule based scripts can allow high level supervisory functions implemented at the IntelliMAX Plant layer. IntelliMAX Plant servers may be deployed in a simplex or fault-tolerant configuration.

Geo-SCADA
Most Geo-SCADA application today will be able to leverage a high bandwidth WAN / intranet backbone infrastructure. IntelliMAX Plant can use this network to provide a multi-site Geo-SCADA enterprise class application framework. Again the key is concurrent multi-client multi-server architecture. This a perfect fit for the “Deploy Once Use Anywhere” paradigm , which forms the basis of IntelliMAX Plant . The resulting system can be configured in a secure manner from any Geo-SCADA WAN computer. Also any of the sites can be observed from other sites or a central location without any integration overhead. IntelliMAX Plant servers may be deployed in a simplex or fault-tolerant configuration.