Cyber security
PcVue implements the necessary features of cybersecurity to protect the system against the growing threats accompanying the rapid change in technologies and the widespread use of connected users in industry networks.
SSL encryption and Secure HTTP (HTTPS) are supported as well as the Integrated Microsoft Windows® authentication (Active Directory).
Mobility
PcVue is mobile-ready: access the data of your application from a tablet or a smartphone is easy using the Android app TouchVue.
Monitoring and controlling your application on a web browser is made easy using the light web client WebVue.
PcVue Access Solutions
A quick access to your data, anytime, anywhere and from any device
A set of solutions to access your data from any device including HTML5-enabled equipment.
- Mobile app with responsive design
Reducing the cost of installation and maintenance:
- No pre-installation required on clients
Without losing sight of the security approach:
- Integrated Microsoft Windows® authentication: Active Directory
- Support of secure HTTP (HTTPS)
Multi-station architectures
PcVue was designed right from the start to support multi-station architectures. During its evolution it has responded to a growing demand from users to increase their installations' capacities for supervision and control. The concepts of client/server, distributed architectures and inter-station messaging are native to PcVue and are configured using a networking wizard.
Thus, the development of a multi-station architecture even for large application is much easier, the system more reliable and the time and costs of development are dramatically reduced.
They are available in the Microsoft Windows environments.
Distributed or Multi-Levels Architectures
- For geographically widely distributed system
- Several levels of control
- For large amount of data/high growth rate projects
- Very flexible
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In large scale applications and geographically widely distributed systems requiring several user stations - such as wind power plants, oil & gas facilities, or water pumping stations - the simple Client-Server architecture is sometimes not a solution.
Several kinds of users may need to use the system, with very different goals and constraints.
In this case, multi levels architecture is more relevant:
Level I: The field level is the level closest to the process ensuring communication between devices and the level II.
Level II: The operation center. That is the core of this architecture where all the data are centralized. At this level operators monitor and control the data (real time and historical) and edit operational reports. This level handles all the operational data such as alarm for electric failures, or process failures and all the production information. The level II makes the main unified data available to the highest level of this architecture
Level III: The dispatch center. The unified data are used by the system operator in order to make strategic decisions for the installations management. The dispatch center sends commands to the Level II. We speak about statistics values here such as the production information over a period, the availability of the process, and so on.
The architecture defines a chain of information and control in which the operation center is the core, for monitoring and controlling the system and serving as interface between the dispatch center and the field.
The system must meet the strong constraints of very large project across a very large territory with plans to expand exponentially while reducing the maintenance effort and costs.
It must be:
- able to support various devices from several manufacturers and potentially millions of data,
- versatile and flexible,
- scalable and perennial,
- very easy to maintain and to upgrade
EXAMPLE OF IMPLEMENTATION
- For very large scale applications and geographically widely distributed system
- Several levels of control
- Very flexible
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In a distributed architecture each station may be a data source (producer) for some variables and a consumer for some others. Moreover, some stations may act as data concentrators for a central control room located in another geographical area.
PcVue allows the development and deployment of multi-server/multi-client applications whereby the various server associations are configured to allow some of them to primarily retrieve information from devices, and others from other servers (as client stations do).
Central servers collect only a subset of all the information, allowing efficient monitoring of the devices from the central control room.
The level I – Local sites is composed of PcVue stations widely distributed getting the data from the field devices and making the data available to the level II through a Wide Aera Network with satellite connection for example.
The level II – The operation center is the core of the architecture with redundant associations of PcVue servers to centralize the data from different stations from level I. Each association of server handles thousands of real time variables and archives the higher critical variable locally.
A pair of servers can also be dedicated to archive the low critical data to a DBMS.
The Client stations connected to the server stations are used as operation and engineering consoles and help the operators to monitor and control the variables from any sites (Real time, alarms…).
The level III – The dispatch center is the highest level of the architecture. It receives the main data unified from the level II through an OPC connection.
Remote Desktop Services
The performances of Windows server platforms are also capitalized by using Remote Desktop Services which allow taking advantage of the PcVue rich clients remotely executed on any device including any terminals with HTML5-compliant web browser.
Virtualization
PcVue is fully compatible with virtualized environments such as vmware® or Hyper-V™, more and more used by the IT, engineering and operations teams to reduce the costs of maintenance, and operations efforts.
