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Industrial Application Server
Significantly Decrease Development Time
Drive Standards with a Simplified Component-Object Based Approach to Application Development
One of the Wonderware® Industrial Application Server's key productivity enablers is its component-object architecture. The Industrial Application Server provides a component-object model that facilitates the development of reusable application objects that represent plant equipment and MES functions.
Application Objects, which are built within the ArchestrA® Integrated Development Environment (IDE), contain all the necessary elements associated with an automation device or MES function, such as historization parameters, tags, alarms and events, documentation, scripts, security, and communication parameters. A library of reusable component templates can be built, replicated and deployed, enabling rapid application development.
Each component template supports change propagation. Thus, a change in the original template can be automatically propagated to all, or select object instances, saving valuable engineering time and money.
With the Industrial Application Server, engineers and system integrators (SIs) can:
- Build a library of pre-engineered application templates to leverage best practices and company engineering standards and
- Turn applications engineering into an assembly process, rather than a programming exercise, enabling dramatic productivity gains that increase from project to project.
Take a Flexible Approach to Application Configuration with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
The ArchestrA IDE provides multiple views of applications, enabling easier development and better system management. Delivered as part of the FactorySuite A²™ Development License, the ArchestrA IDE is powerful and easy-to-use. Application components are configured centrally and deployed to target workstations and servers. The engineer can view and configure the system based on object relationships, the overall plant layout and/or a network deployment perspective.
The IDE is a multi-developer environment that empowers companies to leverage their engineering resources by allowing multiple engineers to work simultaneously on the same project. The IDE supports multiple developers through the use of efficient check-in/check-out procedures and provides an audit trail of revision history for each application component including who made the change, time and date stamps for when the change was made, and a summary of the changes made. The import and export capabilities also enable engineers to take templates with them when they travel or leave the site, giving them ultimate flexibility and easy editing across different systems.
Address Challenging Application Issues with Advanced Microsoft .NET Scripting Capabilities
The Industrial Application Server supports script functions built on .NET development languages, such as Microsoft's VisualBasic.NET, Visual C++.NET or C#. This is possible because of Wonderware's QuickScript.NET language, an easy-to-use scripting language that supports virtually any data type and provides engineers with unlimited capabilities to address even the most challenging applications.
Protect Your System with Data-Level Security, Validation and Audit Trails
Wonderware's Industrial Application Server can lock down every single object and attribute in a network, both from a development and run-time point of view. As data travels through the network, information about who made the request, that person's role, permissions and, in some cases, encrypted password information accompanies the data. There is also an audit trail that keeps track of who made which operator change and when.
Most HMI vendors offer window log-on security, but this only allows them to control who can start an application or interact with a display. This inadequate security model permits any user who can open a display or window to change anything in the control system. In order to restrict data access with this model, operators and administrators must spend a great deal of time scripting or programming security into each application window. Even then, scripted HMI and SCADA security is only enforced at the window interface level, not the data level. This means that the only enforcement of the application security at runtime is through the application windows. Plus, open interfaces like those using the OPC protocol and DDE can pass or transfer data values without security enforcement.
Whereas, the Industrial Application Server provides data security at the data level, which is the lowest possible level of granularity, and extends the Microsoft Windows security model down to the physical equipment layer, providing security attributes that specifically match factory requirements. Therefore, any client application that tries to access data from the system must have appropriate authorization to do so.
Industrial Application Server users utilize the same centralized, easy log-in procedures that the Microsoft model offers. However, the Wonderware Industrial Application Server provides further protection after the clients enter the system. Carrying the security model down to the equipment and associated automation levels provides much greater granularity of secured access.
Simplify the Process of Complying with Regulations like FDA 21 CFR Part 11
The Industrial Application Server’s approach to security is ideal for industrial applications that are impacted by regulatory requirements such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11. Wonderware simplifies the engineering of FDA-regulated applications by providing support for automated configuration audit trails, secured writes and verified writes.
Examples of security settings include:
- Alarm limits, tuning parameters, change privileges;
- Security settings at user, device and physical locations;
- Template configuration; and
- Modification tracking.
Gain More Insight with Streamlined Alarm Management and Historization Tools
Alarm Management
The Industrial Application Server supports a fully distributed alarm sub-system that greatly improves the quality of alarm information, while reducing system configuration time. This powerful sub-system supports three alarm-acknowledgement models as well as condition-oriented, event-oriented and expanded-summary alarms, to easily manage and view alarm conditions. Step-by-step Wizards and easy-to-use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make alarm configuration simple to implement.
Historization
What’s more, the Industrial Application Server is tightly integrated with Wonderware’s IndustrialSQL Server™ real-time plant historian, which acquires, stores and retrieves production, process and material history. The Industrial Application Server greatly simplifies configuration and maintenance of the historian by:
- Configuring historical logging within each application-object template so that each instance carries logging parameters that simplify setup and maintenance; and
- Automatically updating and configuring the historian.
Design Your System According to What Your Plant Needs to Reach Peak Performance
The Industrial Application Server’s IDE provides engineers with a user-defined plant model hierarchy that matches the application structure to a specific plant or discrete manufacturing line. This model empowers users to approach applications with the plant, rather than IT resources, in mind. It is much easier to engineer applications with the ArchestrA IDE. Plus, the model separates application engineering from computer deployment, yielding more flexibility in applications management
InTouch Integration (click image to enlarge)