Rockwell Plant PAx

I work in a multipurpose batch chemical plant. The new plant was built with a Siemens PCS7 system. The system has performed well. I do not like the numerous constraints that Siemens imposes; no virtual servers, XP/2003, no Profinet support (as of v7.1), support wants you to use Siemens computers, etc.
I am now beginning work on upgrading our old plant that still has old foxboro pneumatic single loop controllers.
I was set to use PCS7 and still might since it makes the most sense.
However, I am also considering the Rockwell PLantPAx. I really like the controllogix platform and it is much easier to find integrators familiar with logix as opposed to PCS7. My concerns are it is a new product, has some really bad experiences with View SE (v 4 and 5), and the fact that Rockwell may punt the product line in a year or two (i.e. ProcessLogix).
Does anybody have experiences with the PlantPAx; pro or con? Is it comparable to a real DCS? Is it stable? Thanks

ProcessLogix as I understand it was a partnership with Honeywell and Rockwell. I think it's at least not available anymore from rockwell. PlantPax and ControlLogix have nothing to do with ProcessLogix. PlantPax is just downloadable software for ControlLogix & FTView SE. It's not a DCS but the line between PACs and DCSs are blurring more everyday. PlantPax looks like a good system to get you up and running more quickly.

Yeah I have used in in projects all for in the education sector, by it is nice and fairly easy to use. We mostly use the AIN, AOUT, and new PIDE faceplates and objects. and really is a more of a step towards DCS where you do more configuration than programming.

For example they have some permissive and interlock objects, so you don't necessarly have to program that logic in yourself. I know some people still prefer doing it all from scratch, but is useful to get stuff up and running and I would hope Rockwell throughly test all of there code to ensure it is tight. The one disadvantage is Bloat, but if you have the memory I would definately give it a look.

Word of caution:

PlantPax was designed by RA for numerous scenarios, therefore carries a lot of fat.

You should evaluate your programming standards, graphics standards and alarm management strategies against what/how PlantPax was designed.

In my case, those were the three significant areas that were violated, and therefore we choose not to use it. But we have incorporated a lot of the same strategies within our own custom offer - we have developed our own base AOI's, and have developed custom Object Templates for our HMI (which is Wonderware). It was a significant recapitalization effort, but we estimate that our ROI is 3 years, and works great.


Good luck.

One man's fat is another man's protein. But the wrote the standards to appeal to a wide audience. Of course if you doing this yourself, you could customize it to exactly your needs. But you would spent a good amount of time to develop this yourself. I was at a customer who developed their own standards, but they invested a great amount of time to do so. So PlantPax you can get for free and has been tested. If you "roll your own" you will need to do your own testing and support.

jkerekes said:

One man's fat is another man's protein. But the wrote the standards to appeal to a wide audience. Of course if you doing this yourself, you could customize it to exactly your needs. But you would spent a good amount of time to develop this yourself. I was at a customer who developed their own standards, but they invested a great amount of time to do so. So PlantPax you can get for free and has been tested. If you "roll your own" you will need to do your own testing and support.

Click to expand...

This is the exact issue that we dealt with, and what I am referring to.

Evaluate YOUR standards and requirements. IF it fits, then by all means use it. For us, it did not fit within our requirements and standards. An engineering evaluation was made, and it was cost benefit positive to develop our own. Now I do admit, we did start with PlantPax, stripped out the fat, then modified accordingly.

I'm not disagreeing with you. The routines need to be generic in nature to appeal to the most users. They many not necessarily fit everyone’s standards perfectly. But they will save you time over having to develop them from scratch. As you found out, they can be a good base from which you can tailor your specific requirements. And they’re provided for free.

I do have two issues with them. I’m not crazy about the faceplates provide, but they can be modified too. Also they’re implemented with AOI. I love AOI, but my biggest reason for not using them more, is that they can’t be modified online. I’ve seen similar systems use ST instead.

DCS Packages

I kind of understand the discussion that the PlantPAx is a package that comes with a lot of standard functions that may or may not satisfy your requirements or standards. When we got into the PCS7 system, we found that the system did not have the capabilities to meet our standards plus we found the standard offerings especially faceplates not be what we wanted. So we ended up customizing with both positive and negative ramifications. We encountered a lot of issues when we upgraded from older versions.

I think we could deal with what is offered with the package although it may be a change from the PCS7 offering. My concern is that the package be robust; everything works well together. In the past, I have found that RS or Factory Talk View to be much more problematic and buggy than Wonderware, iFix or WinCC. Controllogix is solid although I have no experience with the enhanced redundancy package which would be a must in our environment.

So far I have not heard anyone say the system is no good.

Plant Pax

Where does one download the Plant Pak FTV addon
Thanks

I have been using C-Logix and FTview along with other "Plant-PAX" "products". I think RA has done a decent job of integrating their products together. I didn’t really start thinking I was setting up a Plant-PAX system I started using various components to achieve my goals and didn’t even think about PAX until my local RA guy started referring to my Plant-PAX system? My point I guess is I used what I needed to do the job.


Maybe start here:

http://discover.rockwellautomation.com/PR_EN_Process_Solutions.aspx

Pax

I had to create an account and post a reply to this thread.

I am the control systems coordinator for a mining corporation and we just finished a project in our mill updating from Schneider PLC's to contrologix. It is a system with over 100 motors, very loop intensive and pretty complicated. We did almost everything in house with the exception of sizing the main processor and designing the network infrastructure to the remote IO. We used a combination of our own logic and the PAX. There are so many great things with PAX that compliment the open programming language that Rockwell provides already. The E3 overload faceplate and AOI is great if you're using Rockwell's gear. The P_VSD is awesome for a great faceplate and AOI that is not specific to Rockwell drives, it is great with any drive, you just feed it the information you want to see on the face plate.
The P_Runtime is a great tool for PM and breakdown tracking. The P_Interlock, P_Motor, P_Permissive and P_Ain are other ones that I use allot. As for the above comments on the memory usage, yes it is pretty heavy but they provide you the tools to size your processor accordingly. Google "PlantPAX tool kit download" and you'll find the downloads for all of the faceplates, AOI'S, Toolkits, white papers on every instruction and all of the stuff you'll need to make your decision. As you can tell I've loved the PAX system and I would recommend it to anyone whether you're completely re-designing or if you just want to add some great things to your existing Rockwell system. You do have to be on some of the higher versions for it to work properly, V20 on the processor and I think?? 8.1 on ftview.

Plant PAX is the second item in the tech support list so that can't be good.

JaxGTO said:

Plant PAX is the second item in the tech support list so that can't be good.

Click to expand...

Because they are supporting their product it is bad? When I used RSLogix Frameworks I had more calls in to tech support on it than I've ever had on RSLogix 5. They never even had an option for in tech support specifically for Frameworks. Having it listed sooner in the list is an indication that they have a large customer base for the product and they want it to get bigger.

You might revisit PCS7 as well. Our system while about 3 years old now, runs Windows7 PRO x64 on our clients, and Windws Server 2008 on servers. I was at Siemens Springhouse location last fall working on a PCS7 upgrade to another facility, and their engineer I was working with had just come back from a install here in the states that ran from virtual servers.
We have toyed with the idea of as well of migrating our existing server backbone to virtual servers, and clients, utilizing thin-stations as client stations.