The leader in plant wide supervisory monitoring and control solutions.

GE Fanuc is pleased to announce the availability of CIMPLICITY® HMI - Plant Edition™ Version 5.5. CIMPLICITY HMI continues to lead the competition in features and functionality making it the most powerful industrial automation software available on the planet. With HMI you can easily build and tailor a system to meet your precise monitoring and control needs, while providing an infrastructure to support your supply chain collaboration needs. CIMPLICITY HMI Plant Edition now easily integrates with the CIMPLICITY Machine Edition View product in a true client / server architecture. In addition, this new version introduces a complete suite of new features as well as ease of use enhancements.

Highlight of New Features in version 5.5:

CIMPLICITY Web Browser Interface

CIMPLICITY has added a new web browser interface to the product to organize and centralize the way you access your CIMPLICITY information via the web. This new web browser interface provides a whole new look and feel to the way you can access WebView. It also provides a way to access the new Terminal Services product option described later in the bulletin.

In addition, through the web browser interface, you can access the power of an XML Server for providing Point and Alarm data reports. Accessing the web browser interface is easy. With your Internet browser open, enter the Network name of your PC in the address field and you are presented with the new CIMPLICITY integrated web based environment. The CIMPLICITY browser interface will automatically explore the network for other CIMPLICITY projects. You can then select to view all the CIMPLICITY projects on the network. By selecting a particular project you can then generate an XML based Point or Alarm Snapshot Report with a click of the mouse. Interested in viewing screens from a particular project? Simply view the list of the screens; select the one of interest, click on the name and a WebView screen will open in the browser and present you a dynamic, interactive view of your CIMPLICITY screen. No pre-configuration or conversion of your CIMPLICITY screens is required. From here you have the full power of WebView where you can view and, with proper privileges configured, perform setpoint actions to control your process.

Experience the power of CIMPLICITY over the web!

CIMPLICITY HMI Terminal Services Support – New Product Option

CIMPLICITY HMI introduces a new product option with Version 5.5 – HMI Terminal Services. GE Fanuc has been on the leading edge providing the widest variety of ways for you to visualize your plant floor information with products such as WebView and ThinView. Now, HMI Terminal Services extends the product offering to provide another easy to use, low administration cost solution for visualizing your information. HMI Terminal Services is built to take advantage of the Microsoft Terminal Services product.

What is Microsoft Terminal Services?

• A product developed for Windows 2000 to deploy a thin client solution to deliver 32-bit Windows to a wide range of desktop hardware devices.

• Terminal Services combines the low cost of a terminal with the benefits of a managed Windows-based environment. It offers the same low cost, centrally managed environment of the traditional mainframe with terminals, but adds the familiarity, ease of use, and breadth of applications support offered by the Windows operating system platform.

The benefit that this delivers is that now you can view and interact with your CIMPLICITY HMI application from a computer without any CIMPLICITY software loaded on it. The CIMPLICITY application resides on a central HMI server and your screens, Point Control Panel, and even the configuration Workbench is served out to you. This is similar to the CIMPLICITY WebView product, but provides you access to applications outside of CimView.

The Conservation Of Fat - As Clients Become Thinner, Servers Become Fatter

There is a trade-off to a thin client / server architecture versus a traditional client / server architecture. With traditional clients such as a CIMPLICITY Viewer, the processing for that local user occurs on the local computer and you are using the horsepower of that machine to draw your screens. Only the point information needed to update the screens is transmitted over the network to the Viewer.

In a thin client architecture, the processing for the screens and all the user’s interaction shifts to the central server. To handle these multiple users, the central server must be sized accordingly. There is also a performance impact with using Thin Clients since all the information required to paint and update the user’s screen must be transmitted from the server to the thin client.

The benefits include:

• Thin client architecture is that there is no local software that needs to be upgraded or changed.
• The thin client receives its information from the application on the server.

• Depending on the application and screens being displayed, up to 50 HMI Terminal Services clients can be supported from a dedicated server. GE Fanuc recommends a minimum of a 900 MHZ Pentium III with at least 256 MB of RAM. An HMI 75 I/O Runtime License can be used to support this Terminal Services Server.

The following chart is provided to help outline some of the differences between the CIMPLICITY visualization products.

When speed and performance is required and the user is on the same local network as the server, a CIMPLICITY Viewer is an excellent choice. For plant floor users who are constantly interacting with CIMPLICITY, a Viewer is a natural selection.

WebView and HMI Terminal Services provide the benefit of concurrent licensing. This allows a license to be used by one user, and when they are done, the license is immediately freed up for another user. Therefore, both WebView and HMI Terminal Services provide an excellent solution for remote or casual users who need periodic access to the information provided by HMI. HMI Terminal Services provides more functionality than WebView since applications outside of CimView are supported including remote configuration.

As mentioned before, HMI Terminal Services requires the Microsoft Terminal Services product. Licenses for Microsoft Terminal Services can be obtained from Microsoft or their distributors.

Network Integration with CIMPLICITY Machine Edition

The family of CIMPLICITY software products has grown stronger than ever with the introduction of HMI Plant Edition 5.5 and Machine Edition 2.11. Now, HMI users can easily browse for points from Machine Edition View projects. Integration is easy since the Machine Edition View projects will appear as CIMPLICITY projects on the network by broadcasting their project name. The CIMPLICITY HMI point applications (CimView, Point Panel, etc) will be able to directly access point data from the Machine Edition View computers simply by referencing fully qualified points. From the perspective of the CIMPLICITY Viewer, the Machine Edition node appears like a CIMPLICITY HMI Plant Edition Server. This unique layered architecture allows you to take full advantage of the complete CIMPLICITY product line to tackle the toughest applications and apply the right product for the right solution.

CimView Parent-Child Windows

This new feature makes it much easier to fully use the multi-window environment of CIMPLICITY HMI while making it easy to manage it as well.

CimView Relative Screen Positioning

A new feature has been added to CimView that allows you to specify the opening position of a new child screen relative to objects on the main parent CimView screen. This allows child windows to be positioned relative to the parent window to a location that you specify. This is another feature that helps you tap into the true power of HMI’s multi-window environment while making it easy to manage and maintain.

CimView Initial Variable Values

A new feature has been added to CimView that allows you to specify the initial value for variables in a screen that is being opened. This allows you to create parameterized (templated) screens with initial starting values.

CimView Linked Object Performance

Runtime linked objects' performance now uses about the same amount of CPU as non-linked objects.

Level Based Security

CIMPLICITY HMI provides a robust set of security features regarding the ability of users to perform setpoints. With Version 5.5 User Role Level based setpoint security has been added. Each user role can now have a numeric level assigned to it. Likewise, each point can have a numeric level assigned to it. If you enable level based security then the user must have a level greater than or equal to the point level in order to set it.

Rapid Historical Trend Retrieval

Alarm Blinking

With HMI 5.5 you can now configure your alarms to blink and at different rates. When you configure alarms in CIMPLICITY you assign them an Alarm Class, which corresponds to the priority of the alarm. Now when you configure the Alarm Class colors you can specify a blink rate in tenths of a second for each of the alarm states (Alarm, Ack, Normal). You can also select what the blink foreground and background colors will be for each of the states. To ease and simplify configuration, the colors are initially set to the inverse of the selected foreground and background colors.

Data Logging Millisecond Time Field

Many of today’s databases’ time fields do not support sub-second logging. Database logging has been enhanced to add a new column in the database table where the sub-second component of the timestamp will be logged. It also provides exact timestamp information in supported DBMSs whose date/time data type supports sub-second fractions but not to millisecond resolution. The CIMPLICITY Trend control has also been enhanced to accommodate querying this field and combines it with the timestamp field to provide a single timestamp with millisecond resolution.

Configuration Automation Interfaces

CIMPLICITY HMI provides you with almost unlimited power to configure your system through its Configuration Automation Interfaces. The Automation Interfaces allow you to make changes to project configuration through scripting while a project is running. With HMI 5.5 additional interfaces have been added to the CIMPLICITY Configuration Automation Model for configuring Users, Roles, Resources, and Global Parameters.

ThinView ViewStation CE Support

ThinView is a thin client technology that GE Fanuc developed for viewing CIMPLICITY screens on CE devices. Two award winning products, PocketView and TabletView use this thin client software to access information from CIMPLICITY Servers. Now, with HMI Version 5.5 we have added ThinView support for the CIMPICITY ViewStation CE devices. When it comes to visualizing the information from your plant floor monitoring and control systems, no one else matches the wide range of flexible solutions available from GE Fanuc.

Project Wizard Support for Modbus RTU

The CIMPLICITY Project Wizard makes setting up and configuring a new system a breeze. One of the unique features of the Project Wizard is that it can detect and automatically configure points for GE Fanuc PLCs. With the new release of 5.5 we have added the ability to automatically detect and configure Modbus RTU devices on Modbus Serial networks as well.

When you run the Wizard it provides you with a list of available protocols that are installed on the system. Once you select the protocols you will be using for the project, the Wizard will go out and automatically detect all the GE Fanuc Ethernet enabled PCs or Modbus Serial Devices on the networks. You can then select the devices you want to communicate with, and specify the data ranges within the device. The Wizard can then automatically configure all the device points for you. Setup has never been easier!

GagePort Mitutoyo OPC Server – Product Option

A new stand-alone OPC Server for GagePort and Mitutoyo devices has been introduced. The server supports Mitutoyo GagePort, FlexPort, and MIG2 gage hubs with any number of hub ports. It also supports any simple serial device that sends its data in an unsolicited manner through an RS-232 connection (such as a bar code reader). The server uses XML as its native configuration file format. The Microsoft XML Document Object Model parser (distributed with IE5) is used to insure XML file integrity. When launched by OLE, the server runs hidden as a resident process, allowing it to continue running when no user is logged into the workstation.

OMRON TCP-IP Device Communications

The Omron TCP/IP device communications module has been enhanced to provide support for Omron CS1 PLCs.