Wonderware integrators / programmers - Need opinions

[dalporto]

Good morning all.

I'm working on a rehab where they had a standalone InTouch 2014 HMI that they called a SCADA, but it's really basic stuff. The worst thing in there (the actual) is they have a lot of "useless" big 1995 schematics pages that are in fact P&ID drawings. It's nice to have but for operation this is basically a waste of time, and since InTouch doesn't seem to allow vector scaling, this is kind of annoying to reuse them in 16:9.

So, I managed to teach myself InTouch back since it wasn't that complicated and I started new "real operation" pages that I'll need anyway to do the commissioning.

Fast forward yesterday, the customer now wants to talk about the screens. Ok.

First, they would like to keep the P&ID pages since their guys cannot easily understand a P&ID DWG. Ok... I'll put them in pop-ups or leave them unscaled somewhere, but now I'll have 2 places to look when I test a point during commissioning, which is annoying. Anyway.

Then, and this is where I need opinions. They want all analog values boxes (we're talking about 100-120 values) to have the capability to open a popup that would display all the information about the value (LL, L, H, HH, SP, PV, manual alarms SP, some weird things, name it). The kind of thing that I had when I was working in mining in Africa and when that made a little sense. With the kind of process I'm dealing with, it has no real added value for one, and second this is an unmanned station that stays empty 90% of time. Also, we don't want to allow the operators to change any values in there, except the few that we already permit with the appropriate SP boxes. Last, the spec covers for mostly what they had before, we're changing from 2014 to 2023, that's all. But the PM wants to give them options, and a price, and unfortunately I'm the "more competent" now these days with WW since we almost never work with it.

My question here is how would do I do that (their "faceplate" popup? Using Citect that would be an easy Genie.

InTouch Standalone, this would be a common popup template with indirect tags and a bunch of script?

If I remember correctly, I think that when using the full System Platform / Archestra / Galaxy (sorry, I'll mix the terms since I never knew for sure what is what in there), that kind of thing can be easily done, is this right?

If so, how much of a pain would it be to turn my standalone project into a galaxy? What should I look for? (I know it's more complicated to use than InTouch standalone and there is a learning curve). I also don't like the InTouch alarm object, I think that Archestra has a better one.

So, would it be a better solution that to start to develop something in Standalone, knowing that they'll want to add other pieces later and finally what they'd want since the beginning was actually a SCADA?


Also, the customer mentions WW report generating solution they'd want to use.

Never heard of it, so I checked, I think that thing has evolved into something different.

If so, what is it, and would it work with InTouch Standalone and / or a Galaxy?


Thank you guys

 

[mad4x4]

You can do popups with Alisis tags and a bit of scripting to pass tags,

As for the P&ID's can you not shell out to Acrobat to use this as a viewer?

As for Galaxy, we are just migrating a system from 2017 to 2024 and one think we looked at was putting it in the galaxy. The consensus is that this is a lager expensive over that unless you are writing from the ground up gives little or no benefit, we actually found it slowed down the project and fail overs (we have twin servers) took lot longer. Biggest issue was the license cost versus gains. Very large against minimalif any gain.

 

[5618]

An alternative to embedding bitmaps, you could make a HTML version of the drawings and call that in a browser window. Window script on show would be something like

#Explorer1.Navigate("C:\Drawings\DWG1.htm");

Quick functions are a nice way to package the indirect scripting.
For this example your quick function is called AnalogQF your IO tags are AinXY123_LL and AinXY123_SP
Your calling button has action

CALL AnalogQF ("Thingie", "XY123");

Each button will have different arguments passed to the quick function.

AnalogQF arguments:
Name as Message
Input as Message

PopupTitle = Name + " Parameters";
IndirectLL.Name = "Ain" + Input + "_LL";
IndirectSP.Name = "Ain" + Input + "_SP";
Show "AnalogPopup";

Your analog popup shows "Thingie Parameters" as a title and the indirect tags show the values of the AinXY123 tags.

 

[Aardwizz]

The big question is: Standalone InTouch? Or System Platform Galaxy?

Either can do what you want, but the approaches are completely different.

With Standalone InTouch, for your analog faceplate popups you'd create a series of Indirect (not "alias" as Max4x4 said) tags of the various characteristics you want, then create the faceplate in WindowMaker and link the animation to the the Indirect tags. Then each "analog box" would open the one faceplate with some scripting to set the name of the indirect tag to the IO linked tag for that device. DBDump / DBLoad and Excel can wonderful tools to build your tag database.

With System Platform, you would create a template object, give it all the attributes that you need, create both the faceplate graphic and the "analog box" for the template. Then you'd create an instance of that template for each analog you have. You can then either create a System Platform graphic object with these object instances on them (and then embed the single ArchestrA graphic on an Intouch graphic), or you can embed each individually on the Intouch graphic.

If you go the S.P. route, there's much to learn about you bind the object to the PLC tag. Intouch tag database is straight-forward but tedious. ArchestrA binding is more arcane, but if done well (with attributes having a 1:1 correspondence with UDT elements), it can be easy to maintain and expand. Intouch's "Smart Tags" were a step in this direction, but were not robust: if you changed the template, none of the tags created from the template got updated with the new structure. Not so with System Platform templates / instances.

The changes your customer is asking for is way beyond "Upgrade from v.2017 to v.2024." There is (or should be) a huge price tag associated with what is fundamentally a complete from-scratch remake of their current system.

But that's your business. If you can keep it.

 

[dalporto]

Thank you very much for your message, pretty much how I was seeing it. I should add that we're doing 2 x 99.9% similar units, and that it's when SP is interesting too.

In our domain WW App Server is not a gold standard like in mines, so we don't get to often work with it, but I've been looking to learn it since a while. I've once knew a little bit about it when I was "maintaining" a WW system back in 2012 but not much since. I've been using mostly Citect for the last 6 years. Now with the licensing prices, our main customer wants to move to VT SCADA. We'll see, but I see that as a downgrade. Anyway.

I talked with Aveva this afternoon, he was able to pull their licence information, AppServer is not covered right now, neither is "Aveva Reports for Operations" (this would be the report software they were talking about), but for almost the same price, my local distributor could have it.

Then, like you said, it's then commercial ($$$) and the PM job to to, but he's asking me how long would we need to go full SP2023 from scratch with a little help from the guys that provides our integrator license, and I don't have a clue, not even sure if I can re-use what I already did in the Standalone InTouch.

That would be a great project to start from scratch, but I don't want to shot myself in the foot neither, really not sure how fast it can be done. It's not like it's complicated graphics or animations, it's mostly boxes with text and values, or a square for a breaker, or a disconnect to display open or close on a 1-line, really basic stuff, don't want to give them a useless X-Mas tree like they have right now.

But since it's the kind of place that want to re-use PLC modules on a rehab with new cabinets, I doubt they will have the budget for that, and also it's not like we don't have enough job as it is.

We'll see. Thanks again for your input.





PS: the P&IDs are not actual DWG, it's really "animated" windows showing the P&ID with very few if none animation.