A number of new strategic features and enhancements have been added to the Yokogawa FAST/TOOLS distributed supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system.
New developments in FAST/TOOLS Release 8.4 include a trending package, high-availability computing with 'hot standby' for reduced downtime, a LINUX port and a number of new drivers for popular control systems.
This new trending package provides outstanding visualisation capabilities and a high level of flexibility via a highly-intuitive user interface. It can operate in a stand-alone configuration or alongside the USER/FAST module of FAST/TOOLS.
Features of the trending package include 2D and 3D rendering, full zoom capabilities and animation, historical and real-time trending, powerful sliders for various axes including value and time, easy time-range selection and automatic selection of history groups. It supports a maximum of 20 pens, as well as relative and shift related time intervals, and trend data can be exported in bitmap and CSV data files. Other features include configurable legends (location, description and transparency), the ability to reverse time and value axes, and complete flexibility of window decoration and layout.
The high availability computing package provides a hot-standby FAST/TOOLS server configuration to support redundant server configurations and reduce down-time. Features include redundant server support, the monitoring of CPU levels and activity of FAST/TOOLS processes, synchronising data between redundant servers, watchdog monitoring, and the logging of events and diagnostics of changes in the hot standby configuration.
A DCOM tunneller running over the internal software bus of FAST/TOOLS eliminates any potential security and configuration issues associated with DCOM: in particular, the DCOM setting problems that can occur when running OPC-DA server and clients on a PC that does not have FAST/TOOLS installed.
An advanced engineering wizard is now available for integrating FAST/TOOLS and the STARDOM network control system. It automates some of the steps required in a FAST/TOOLS-STARDOM project, and automatically configures user faceplates based on the STARDOM configuration.
FAST/TOOLS now supports LINUX as a new operating platform. A mix of operating systems - LINUX server with Windows XP clients, for example - is possible for optimal performance and availability.
Also available is a Microsoft Excel Report add-in, which loads FAST/TOOLS real-time, history, alarms, logs files and configuration data into Excel worksheets for reporting and analysis purposes, says the company.
