GE Intelligent Platform Releases Proficy HMI/SCADA – iFIX v5.0
Superior yesterday. Even greater today.
Building on a track record of success and continual enhancements, the latest release of Proficy HMI/SCADA – iFIX from GE Intelligent Platforms is here: iFIX 5.0.
A superior SCADA solution, this release transitions iFIX into a powerful next-generation visualization, control and real-time information management solution. Like never before, this best-inclass supervisory monitoring
and control software enables you to drive better analytics and leverage more reliability, flexibility and
scalability across your enterprise.
iFIX 5.0 is packed with innovative new features and advanced capabilities such as enhanced failover that supports database and alarm synchronization, bundled and integrated Historian, a new charting tool that supports SPC and logarithmic charts, advanced alarm escalation, filtering and display, and a Microsoftfluent user interface with more than 500 new preconfigured graphic objects and thumbnail support.
Adding to its existing robust scalability and flexible connectivity, iFIX 5.0 now offers tighter integration with our Proficy software suite—providing a window into your total operations for optimized decision making. In short, it gives you the power to transform your operations for a sustainable advantage.
What’s new about iFIX 5.0?
Updated look and feel for faster development
iFIX 5.0 comes with a completely new look and feel for the Workspace and Database Manager, based on a Microsoft-fluent User Interface (UI) technology. The new UI follows the Ribbon Bar concept, which allows you to easily access your tools during application development and configure Quick Access Toolbars for frequently used tools. The new UI also organizes all the configuration tools in the form of Galleries that allow you to view all available options “on the go” and reduces the time to access these tools.
Top >>
Enhanced failover for increased reliability
You can increase reliability with iFIX 5.0’s new and enhanced failover feature, which enables you to synchronize real-time data such as alarm setpoints, and synchronize every aspect of the tag database as well as alarms across the entire network. The new failover capability is easy to configure and allows you to prioritize your networks for data synchronization; you can separate your real-time SCADA network from the data synchronization network to boost performance.
Top >>
New charting tool to expand analytical capability for higher performance
iFIX 5.0 introduces a new state-of-the-art charting tool that expands the software’s capability
to display X-Bar, R-Bar, S-Bar, Histogram and Logarithmic charts, in addition to the more
traditional real-time and historical charts. With support for advanced CGI graphics and a wide range of plotting types such as Bar, Area, Spline and Best Fit Curves, the new charting tool enables you to configure different line and display styles. Ideal for GE Fanuc’s Proficy Historian product, this new tool implements an advanced algorithm to fetch and plot data efficiently, boosting overall system performance.
Top >>
Tighter and bundled Proficy Historian to provide best-in-class data management
Forming a powerful combination with GE's Proficy Historian, iFIX 5.0 provides you with a true
real-time data management solution. This new release of iFIX provides a one-time configuration capability for the iFIX and Proficy Historian databases; the two products are now tightly integrated to synchronize database settings, reducing the maintenance on product configurations.
In addition, iFIX 5.0 enables you to read timestamped data into your process graphics from Proficy Historian using iFIX’s standard Datalink, providing easy accessibility to historical data in context to real-time data. iFIX’s unique VisiconX tools now have an added capability of connecting directly to Proficy Historian tables, allowing you to display data grids into graphics without configuring complex SQL queries. Furthermore, the iFIX product installation now includes an integrated Proficy Historian installation, making it easier for you to set up the system.
Top >>
Alarm display enhancements and alarm escalation for improved notification of process abnormalities
Alarm management is one of the most critical aspects of an HMI/SCADA system, and iFIX 5.0 introduces some new tools to filter alarms, display alarms and notify you of alarm escalations. The iFIX Alarm Summary now allows you to filter alarms based on acknowledgment status, enabling you to analyze critical alarm behavior. The Alarm Summary display options also have added support for coloring alarms based on status or priority and acknowledgement. In addition, iFIX 5.0 introduces an alarm escalation feature that allows the real-time Alarm Summary to generate an event if the severity of a particular alarm has increased, thus improving notification about process abnormalities.
Top >>
All new custom dynamos and a new dynamo converter for easy configuration
iFIX 5.0 comes packed with over 500 pre-built graphic objects, called dynamos, which include ISA-specific symbols for valves and support versioning to track any changes made to the master dynamos. All of these objects support dynamic linking, which enable you to update your graphics with any changes made to the master dynamo object. All dynamos have been built natively in iFIX, and thus are extremely scalable and support maximum animations. To enable existing customers to upgrade, iFIX 5.0 introduces a dynamo converter, which helps convert existing custom dynamos into objects that support versioning and dynamic linking.
Top >>
Tools to increase productivity by reducing development and maintenance time
Expanded Discover and Auto Configuration tool
The Discover and Auto Configuration tool in iFIX is a big differentiating feature that allows you to read in the PLC configuration from its PLC file and configure the driver, database and Proficy Historian from one location in a single effort. iFIX 5.0’s Discover and Auto Configuration tool now supports Rockwell’s RSLogix 5/500 for PLC5, SLC 500 and Micrologix controllers, Siemens Step 7 for the S7 controllers and the generic OPC Client driver for configuring third-party device servers.
Top >>
Graphic thumbnail support
iFIX 5.0 now supports a “thumbnail view” of its graphics in Windows® Explorer. This support has also been extended into the iFIX Workspace, where you can view snapshots of your graphics as you move the mouse over the graphic names – helping developers and maintenance personnel locate the right display quickly and efficiently.
Top >>
Custom scaling for analog data within database tags
iFIX 5.0 further enhances the product’s SCADA capability by introducing a custom scaling capability for analog tags within the database blocks. This allows you to configure one tag that reads in non-standard raw values and outputs an EGU-specific value – reducing the development and maintenance time on the database.
Top >>
Loadable blocks bundled with the product
Loadable blocks are specialized database blocks that have been created over the years based on customer requirements and input. Traditionally, these blocks are available on GE’s Support website for download and use. However, iFIX 5.0 includes all of these blocks on the product CD, thus making it readily available for you and expanding its already powerful database offering. For existing users, this will provide a seamless upgrade, and for new customers, it will add more power to their database configurations.
Top >>
Voice of Customer features
iFIX 5.0 also includes several Voice of Customer requests, which have translated into major features and minor customer delighter enhancements. Key features include alarm distribution support for the AR and DR blocks in the iFIX database, easier-to-configure UI for network and alarm filters and some event trapping support for iFIX’s VBA scripting commands.
Summary
iFIX 5.0 is packed with innovative new features and advanced capabilities such as enhanced failover that supports database and alarm synchronization, bundled and integrated Historian, a new charting tool that supports SPC and logarithmic charts, advanced alarm escalation, filtering and display, and a Microsoft-fluent UI with more than 500 new dynamos and thumbnail support. Better than ever, iFIX 5.0 enables you to drive better analytics and leverage more reliability, flexibility and scalability across your enterprise.
For more detailed improvements download the iFIX 5.0 Data Sheet (pdf).
For product information or if you are interested in upgrading, contact your AutomaTech Business Development Manager today.