Siemens is extending its software range for Process Analytical Technology (PAT) with Simatic Sipat version 4.1. This scalable and modular software solution helps companies to monitor and control the quality of their products online during manufacturing. Version 4.1 features a new runtime user interface, further increased stability and robustness and expanded analysis techniques. Its main applications are in the pharmaceutical, fine chemicals and food and beverage industries.

Simatic Sipat is a scalable and modular software solution that enables companies to extend their quality assurance activities on a step-by-step basis within the scope of the PAT initiative. With PAT, product development and production process can be monitored, controlled and optimized by measuring the critical to quality attributes (CQA) of raw materials, process materials and procedures. This continuous monitoring of product quality can prevent deviations from specifications and therefore reduce production costs. In addition, it allows for Real Time Release Testing, so final quality inspections can be reduced or completely eliminated.

The latest version of Sipat, V4.1, has a more intuitive, powerful and flexible user interface. Thanks to the new dashboard function, users can now obtain a quick overview of all running PAT methods and key parameters (e.g. Critical to Quality Attributes such as dissolution, blend uniformity etc.). The embedding of the user interface to Simatic PCS 7 and Simatic WinCC also allows the user to visualize and control all PAT methods from the existing process control system or SCADA system.

Simatic Sipat 4.1 ensures even greater stability and robustness so that the system remains available as much as possible even in the event of plant network faults or temporary process instrument failure. After reconnection of the analytical instruments to the network, Sipat recovers all buffered data without requiring any manual user intervention. New functions include an optimized OPC data access interface for data capture and updated device analyzer drivers. Furthermore, the new OPC automation service enables methods to be controlled in a much more integrated fashion with the automation platform. The innovations implemented in version 4.1 also include embedded real-time statistical evaluations and context-dependent data analysis, meaning that, for example, any deviations from the setpoints for biochemical reactions can be detected at an early stage and countermeasures initiated where needed.

ICONICS, a Microsoft® Application Development Partner of the Year Finalist, Gold Certified Partner and provider of Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Manufacturing Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows® operating systems, is excited to announce new features for Hyper Historian™ including support for the cloud via Windows Azure™. Hyper Historian is a high speed, reliable and robust industrial plant historian solution designed for mission critical applications.

ICONICS’ exciting new cloud-enabled technology makes Hyper Historian one of the first industrial plant historians available on the cloud. It is now more scalable than ever, as clients can leverage Microsoft’s public cloud application platform to access their Big Data from any desktop, Web browser or mobile device. This feature reduces IT costs with simple setup and minimal maintenance requirements, allowing customers to infinitely grow their application based on the changing needs of their business. Customers experience increased collaboration while maintaining the security that they have come to expect from ICONICS products.

Another feature in its upcoming release enables Logger-to-Logger communications to aggregate and merge data from any plant historian server. This allows Hyper Historian servers to exchange data hierarchically with other Hyper Historian servers or with third-party historians as well. These data exchanges can be triggered on a schedule or manually on demand, regardless of whether the server is located on premise or in the cloud. This enables remote access to the most critical information with maximum flexibility and control.

Taking full advantage of the latest 64-bit .NET-based computing technologies and numerous performance features, including full utilization of multi-core hardware, Hyper Historian is the first plant historian to be compatible with Microsoft Windows 8, Certified for Microsoft Windows Server 2012, and to integrate with SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure. The software also fully leverages OPC UA communication standards, as well as a wide variety of other protocols for connecting to existing infrastructure.

“Due to the highly variable nature of wind power, owner-operators need powerful historians to enable their analysis and understanding of both individual unit and aggregate wind farm performance," said Harry Forbes, Senior Analyst at ARC Advisory Group. "A tool such as Hyper Historian is critical for identifying trends and deviations in unit behavior and diagnosing their root causes.”

The above enhancements add to Hyper Historian's already extensive capabilities that include:

· Extensive Redundancy – Supports redundancy at all levels, including the use of remote distributed data collectors, multiple distributed loggers and multiple OPC classic and OPC UA interfaces.

· Intelligent Asset Technology – Hyper Historian can now be integrated with AssetWorX™, the ISA-95-compliant Asset Modeling tool available with the GENESIS64™ HMI/SCADA system. Any analysis derived by Hyper Historian can be included as a property of any asset.

· Third-party OPC HDA Compliance – Assures interoperability with hundreds of applications and integrates automatic failover to active loggers.

· Powerful Performance Calculations – The extensive performance calculation capabilities can now be configured to execute on redundant platforms.

Hyper Historian is being used today for plant historian applications in industrial and utility applications throughout the world, including wind asset independent performance verification and generation plant monitoring and analysis.

ICONICS, a Microsoft® Application Development Partner of the Year Finalist, Gold Certified Partner and provider of Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Manufacturing Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows® operating systems, is excited to announce the launch of its new MobileHMI apps for Microsoft Surface™ devices running Windows RT, Windows Phones, Apple iPads and iPhones and Android™ devices.

Users can visualize wind generation and turbine operations from any mobile device with dazzling, fully animated graphics or respond to alarms and alerts in real time. They can utilize natural multi-touch gestures to swipe through their utility assets and zoom or drill down into equipment to see all relevant information to support their maintenance tasks. ICONICS MobileHMI allows users to achieve instant, one-touch access to operational KPIs.

“ICONICS has proven that Windows 8 delivers the responsiveness and robustness needed for critical utility, process and discrete manufacturing applications," said John Richards, Senior Director of Windows App Marketing for Microsoft Corp. "Plant operators and supervisors no longer need to be tethered to the control room, and corporate executives are now virtually a touch away from real-time operations performance KPIs, independent of their travel schedules."

MobileHMI apps are fully secure and communicate with ICONICS products such as GENESIS64™, AnalytiX®, Hyper Historian™ and others. This integration enables OPC, OPC UA, BACnet, SNMP, and Modbus TCP/IP compliance, helping ensure that data from any wind farm, plant, building or equipment is immediately viewable on your mobile device. ICONICS offers a total solution that can integrate with almost any plant control network or building automation system network to make it accessible from mobile devices.

"Our MobileHMI apps deliver rich visualization using HTML5 and Windows RT thin mobile technology," said ICONICS CEO and President Russ Agrusa. "Standard features, including dynamic real-time graphics, alarm notifications and extensive trending and charting, are now available on any device. ICONICS is proud to launch our MobileHMI app, via the Windows Store, Apple’s App Store and the Google Play™ store, to enable operations from Any Glass, Anytime™.”

With MobileHMI, ICONICS continues to demonstrate its strategy of configuring once and publishing to “Any Glass”. Visualizations, including graphics that are interactive with secure command and control capabilities, real-time and historical trends and much more, can be defined once and then published to run on the MobileHMI app. Supported form factors include Microsoft Surface, iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and phones, Web browsers, and Microsoft SharePoint® Web Parts. For more information about the MobileHMI™ Apps from ICONICS.

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ICONICS, a Microsoft® Application Development Partner of the Year Finalist, Gold Certified Partner and provider of Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Automation Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows® operating systems, announces a greatly expanded Wind AnalytiX® software solution. This new solution offers extensive integration of energy and meter sources into one unified platform with real-time monitoring, automatic 3D terrain elevation drawing, an extensive data historian, advanced distributed alarm management and notification and data analytics.

Wind AnalytiX quickly turns large amounts of real-time and historical data into valuable information and monitors renewables' Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE). With capabilities of forecast integration, production projections and other fully customizable report templates, Wind AnalytiX rivals other products on the market with its quick and integrated reporting. Advanced dashboards deliver rich user experiences and KPIs needed for optimum renewables management and to help drive continuous improvement. Additional data analysis capabilities assure renewable assets are online and producing at specified performance.

When failures do occur, Wind AnalytiX issues alerts and maintenance notifications and will provide automatic guidance, resulting in reduced downtime and reduced costs related to diagnostics and repairs. With role-specific permission, users can format custom dashboards to promote ease of use. Benefitting from advanced graphics, users are now able to select areas of EarthWorX™ maps to generate accurate elevation profiles with the 3D Terrain object. Applications with distinct data requirements can utilize standard protocols like OPC, SNMP, BACnet and SOAP Web Services. As a fully OPC-compliant solution, Wind AnalytiX offers Universal Connectivity for any project.

The Wind AnalytiX suite includes the following applications:

•EarthWorX™ – Integrate live maps using ESRI mapping technology as well as Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps. Quickly view geographically dispersed wind and renewable assets across a 3D terrain, visualized in real time with historical equipment faults. Users can zoom or pan through maps to navigate across their entire renewable assets and operations while recognizing issues without delay, using ICONICS' patented Smart Pin Technology.

•Hyper Historian™ – An extremely high performance Plant Historian that can archive high volumes of equipment condition, power, and power quality data at high resolution and then deliver complex analysis, charting and reporting.

•FDDWorX™ – A Fault Detection and Diagnostics Solution – Advanced algorithms analyze, detect and predict equipment and efficiency faults. When faults do occur, the system provides a list of probable causes with current estimated probabilities.

•PortalWorX™ – Simple-to-configure dashboard technology delivers the world’s leading visualization to any Web browser. PortalWorX integrates with Microsoft SharePoint® and Silverlight® and provides customizable KPIs, charting, Excel® grids, alarming, reports and many other dashboard Web parts.

•AssetWorX™ – An Intelligent Asset Technology that allows users to define assets and apply sophisticated intelligence and analytics. Defined assets can include wind turbines and substations, based on the IEC61400 and IEC61850 standards. AssetWorX significantly decreases engineering time for each wind power and utility operation.

"Soaring oil prices and Middle East political instability are accelerating demand and simplifying justification of new wind power projects, which stimulates the market need for automation tools necessary to maximize production of wind energy that have the most dramatic effect on profitability and asset utilization,” said Craig Resnick, Research Director, ARC Advisory Group. “Solutions such as Wind AnalytiX provide the information needed through visualization and reporting tools that help wind power projects maximize operational efficiency and reduce costs.”