Secure environment

Implementing and maintaining a secure and reliable control environment with minimal effort and time is a challenging mission faced by all plant operators and personnel today.

Based on the IEC 62351-8 security standard, S+ Operations defines rights and roles for a user or user groups with very fine granularity. Sophisticated authorization and role-based access control (RBAC) provide a tight guard against unwanted activities.

• User authentication
• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Event logging / audit trails
• USB event logging
• Back-up / restore
• Hardened hosts
• Host firewall configuration
• Antivirus
• Network zones
• Security patch validation
  

S+ Operations’ advanced alarm management functions provide truly integrated process condition information for timely and efficient alarm management.

S+ Operations is putting its Alarm Management solutions to work throughout the power generation industry. The sophisticated alarm management system helps operators handle the most demanding and critical situations, avoiding costly downtime.

Read more in the S+ Operations Alarm Management Brochure.

Remove unnecessary alarms to bring those alarms that need action to the forefront and define alarm relevancy to the operator. 

Monitor, manage and optimize alarm management with the collection of alarm analysis tools in Alarm Portal

Alarm Portal features many graphical and analytical alarm management tools:

Integrated Geographical Information System

• Cross navigation between GIS and process objects (tags, alarms, graphics etc.)
• Alarm Visualization and acknowledgement directly on the maps
• Combine temporal and spatial representation of data in GIS
• Independent of maps vendor – fully compatible with maps from vendors like ESRI ArcGIS, Google, Bing
• Ability to use own geo-database, GIS map-server and web-based GIS client visualization
• Enhanced security inside the control room – S+ Operations GIS allows full functionality without requiring internet connection

Pocket portal allows to easily expand user operations directly from a smartphone, tablet or laptop

• Platform independent, HTML5 web-based application
• Provides access to real-time and historical data simultaneously in one display
  
• Access to device status, process conditions, trends, alarms and events, performance dashboards, etc.
• Full touch-based design suited for mobile devices
• Runs within any browser without need for additional client software
• Secure using protocol encryption and user access control

Pocket Portal Operator Client

Pocket Portal Operator Client is the extended functionality of the well-known Pocket portal offering. The Pocket Portal Operator Client allows for the remote operator to enter a value to the S+ Operations system. This is the perfect solution for:

• For SCADA projects which require the remote operator to take control if needed
• Water Utilities which have the need to enter lad data (samples) into the Symphony Plus system (Value and Status of the lab value)
• Any other remote operator solution where intervention may be required.

 

S+ Operations Historian

• Easy and flexible data access for operators, supervisors, engineers and management
• Remote desktop manager displays
• Seamless view of real-time and history
• Discrete tag tickers / KPI reporting
• History data from all sources
• Flexible ready made report templates (e.g. SOE, trip, operation, status, etc.)
• Integrated applications assess plant equipment performance
• Monitor and report equipment degradation
• Performance displays indicate effects of current conditions on plant heat rate and fuel costs
• Performance alarms and CMMS connectivity streamlines maintenance

Plant optimization

Utilities are constantly forced to optimize plant operation and to strictly control life cycle cost in order to protect the investment. ABB offers substantial support to meet these demanding challenges. 

Read more about Plant Optimization.

Operator effectiveness is fundamental to a plant’s performance. However, with fewer plant operators, a generational shift in the operator workforce, and increasing complexity of plant operations, it is becoming ever more challenging.

Symphony® Plus, with its intuitive, easy-to-use human machine interface (HMI), leads operators to greater awareness, faster response and better decisions.

S+ Operations is designed for high performance in every aspect involved: human machine interface, integrated operations, seamless life cycle management, information management, alarm management, security, process optimization, and with flexible, scalable fault-tolerant design.

S+ Operations is built on the foundation of field proven technology, and provides a seamless evolution path for human machine interfaces of previous generations.

The key to operator effectiveness

In the era of big data and the Internet of Things, power plants have the capacity to produce more data in a single day than they did in a month 10 years ago. Intelligent equipment, smart devices and sophisticated control systems continuously monitor plant performance, producing a constant flow of measurements and readings on every asset in the plant. But if this data is not provided in context, it can result in information overload and lead to poor decision-making, production loss and reduced profitability.

Staff in all parts of the power plant are dependent on speedy access to the information they need when they need it, none more so than the plant operators. The challenge for HMI vendors is to provide staff - and operators in particular - with the information they require to make correct and timely decisions, while excluding all the information they do not need. The new generation of high-performance HMIs is designed to do this.

Learn more from In Control.

Leading paths to greater awareness, faster response and better decisions 

Handling the unplanned outages has become the number-one priority for many companies today. On an average, operators deal with thousands of alarms per day. Hence, they should face no more than two alarms per 10-minute period but alarm overload distracts the operators and often causes unplanned downtime.

For maximum plant performance, high performance HMI and advanced alarm management helps to improve the operator's tools and work environment. An ABB case study reveals savings of more than $800,000 from upgrading to a high performance HMI.

In control rooms of old, the number of alarms was limited by the amount of space on the control room panel board and the cost of wiring equipment from the production area to the board. 

Annunciators, indicators and switches (to acknowledge and clear a resolved alarm) had to be essential to justify a place on the panel. If a new alarm was needed, an existing alarm would usually have to  make way. 

This began to change with digital signals and the distributed control system (DCS) in the 1980s. Panel boards were replaced by monitors and servers, and signals were transmitted from plant equipment to computer processors, where the signals were turned into actionable information. But the alarms were overloading the control room and terms such as flooding, nuisance, chattering, fleeting and stale were coined to describe them and their effect on the operators. 

The modern HMIs are equipped with high performance grayscale graphics, using color carefully and provide effective alarm handling and analysis. 

The new generation of HMIs has a huge impact on operator performance:

Research shows that the new generation of HMIs has a huge impact on operator performance:
• they improve the operator’s ability to detect abnormal situations before an alarm occurs by a factor of five;
• the operator success rate in handling abnormal situations is almost 100 percent; and,
• the time it takes to correctly handle the situation is almost half that of operators working with traditional HMIs

• Consistency in graphic layout to ensure operator situational awareness
• Tab-based navigation for one-click access to primary displays
• Embedded trends, which display historical data in a graphic to efficiently draw the attention of the operator to abnormalities and deviations
• The normal operating range and high / low alarm limits are shown for each item of equipment using an intuitive bar graph
• Bubble-up alarming allows the alarm with the highest priority to ‘bubble up’ above lower priority alarms associated with the same device
  

• Integrated help displays in the form of pop-ups
• Extendable faceplates put all the information the operator needs in one place
• Bring attention to alarms that need action and define alarm relevancy to the operator, keeping the
• operator focused on plant performance.
• Monitor, manage and optimize alarms with the collection of alarm analysis tools in Alarm Portal.
• Build reports to analyze all types of plant alarms.
• Assess alarms via alarm rationalization packages.
• Assign priorities to most frequent alarms.

Control room design benefits:

Learn more about Control Room Design.

Power Generation Training Center 

Power Generation Training Center provides world class learning services to help you get the most out of your control system. A wide range of instructor-led and web-based courses, e-learnings and workshop are available to fit very different customer needs.

Read more.