Situational Awareness Project

Bradley,

Thank you for the reply.

Okay, I'll try my best to explain, but keep in mind I'm only talking about the clients below...

We have several sites (8), each with their own master project and includes. Each site runs it's own master project on one client machine for local control of the site with 2/3 monitors, there is no issues with that because the site personnel only needs control of that one site. The issue comes in at our remote 24 hour desk operations center where all 8 sites are controlled primarily from where we combine the all of the site's master projects into a master/master project and run that. We are currently using the old Tab Style templates, we have a top most menu items that are the site's names, when those are selected, it updates (shows) the second level menu items for the individual screens for the site. Easy to navigate from site to site, no mater if you have one monitor or eight per client.

The SA Style system does not allow us to switch sites as the context (root level) is locked during runtime. Meaning that the navigation is pinned/locked to a certain site and requires a shutdown-reconfig-restart of the client runtime. This is a HUGE problem for us. First is simple redundancy, we have four client machines that can display any site's screens on the fly if one of the machines goes down. Second is upgrades, we need to take a client down when performing upgrades/updates, pushing a project update, or even simple Windows updates which can take a long time to complete at times.

We feel that Citect did good overall on the SA style project template to better fit ISA standard out of the box, but there are some areas like the one mentioned above that need attention to better fit the industry and to be flexible. We are bringing on a new site using the SA style system because is all green field work and will be migrating our older system as time goes on.

Also, our new site has a lot of replicated equipment, only the cluster changes, I has found that the new composite genies don't play nice at all. We'd like to have one graphics display for both "units" and just switch the cluster context, this does not work. So we need to double the work and maintain two of the exact copies (minus the cluster name prefix in the genies). Though, I kinda get it, the system needs to know which graphics display to navigate to when drilling into the navigation when chasing alarms, but it gets to be a lot of extra development work.

I hope I have helped you better see the issues we are facing.

Regards,

Chris

Bradley,

Thank you for the reply.

Okay, I'll try my best to explain, but keep in mind I'm only talking about the clients below...

We have several sites (8), each with their own master project and includes. Each site runs it's own master project on one client machine for local control of the site with 2/3 monitors, there is no issues with that because the site personnel only needs control of that one site. The issue comes in at our remote 24 hour desk operations center where all 8 sites are controlled primarily from where we combine the all of the site's master projects into a master/master project and run that. We are currently using the old Tab Style templates, we have a top most menu items that are the site's names, when those are selected, it updates (shows) the second level menu items for the individual screens for the site. Easy to navigate from site to site, no mater if you have one monitor or eight per client.

The SA Style system does not allow us to switch sites as the context (root level) is locked during runtime. Meaning that the navigation is pinned/locked to a certain site and requires a shutdown-reconfig-restart of the client runtime. This is a HUGE problem for us. First is simple redundancy, we have four client machines that can display any site's screens on the fly if one of the machines goes down. Second is upgrades, we need to take a client down when performing upgrades/updates, pushing a project update, or even simple Windows updates which can take a long time to complete at times.

We feel that Citect did good overall on the SA style project template to better fit ISA standard out of the box, but there are some areas like the one mentioned above that need attention to better fit the industry and to be flexible. We are bringing on a new site using the SA style system because is all green field work and will be migrating our older system as time goes on.

Also, our new site has a lot of replicated equipment, only the cluster changes, I has found that the new composite genies don't play nice at all. We'd like to have one graphics display for both "units" and just switch the cluster context, this does not work. So we need to double the work and maintain two of the exact copies (minus the cluster name prefix in the genies). Though, I kinda get it, the system needs to know which graphics display to navigate to when drilling into the navigation when chasing alarms, but it gets to be a lot of extra development work.

I hope I have helped you better see the issues we are facing.

Regards,

Chris