SCADA platform for control & monitoring

New benefits for industrial monitoring and control of facilities!

ControlMaestro™ 2013, the latest version of Elutions's SCADA solution for the Automation, Control-Command and Monitoring of facilities/technical infrastructures to support their operational performance improvement has been released.

With more than 75,000 licenses deployed worldwide in mission critical applications for areas such as building management, water treatment and technical infrastructure management, Elutions continues to support its customers through a robust, scalable, secure and sustainable solution that maintains backward compatibility from the former platform versions.

"In constant technological evolution since 1986 with the first version of the SCADA called Wizcon™, the SCADA platform achieved a succession of major milestones to support the specific needs of highly competitive market demand as well as conformance with stringent standards." said Dominique Gueguen, Consultant at Elutions.

Once again, ControlMaestro allow the delivery of new benefits for its customers.

An optimized and sustainable management of customer capital investments      
The new ControlMaestro 2013 version obtained the BACnet Advanced operator WorkStation Certification (according to the BACnet 09) corresponding to the highest level of compatibility recognized in the market.

With more than 160 standard communication drivers available, ControlMaestro allow bidirectional communication between heterogeneous equipment (even from different generations), and offers an open and extensive interoperability and avoids having to reinvest in equipment renewal. To a larger extent, because it is independent from any manufacturer, most of standards and communication protocols, including OPC, Modbus, SQL and ODBC, etc. are supported.

Because ongoing communication with facilities becomes important in terms of user mobility, to meet the latest technology trends Elutions has developed a HTML5 web portal to view, control or modify the lists of data points, alarms and values ​​via a simple web browser, a smartphone or a tablet. ControlMaestro 2013 also offers the advantage to monitor and modify an application remotely via a Windows 'Remote Desktop' connection.

Much more than a simple supervisor, the software is built to handle mixed architectures, physical and/or virtual with a large acquisition capacity allowing customers to reduce their capital expenditures.

A reduced development and operating cost for customers
To control the various processes and facilities, new tools allow reducing the engineering productivity and the human errors risk.

The development Studio now allows editing of properties of multiple tags and alarms. Thus, an application can quickly be updated.

The Audit Trail can now filter its actions. For example, when updating an application, unwanted actions can be filtered and not recorded in the log.

History of tags and alarms is simplified and more robust through the use of Microsoft SQL Server database (local or remote server).

Combined with other tools for the automatic generation of tags (Tag generator™) and integration of AutoCAD® drawings (CAD Converter ™), the ControlMaestro ergonomics really brings comfort and saves significant time during deployment of SCADA applications.

An increased security of customer mission-critical applications   
To better secure the process control, to support preventative maintenance and mitigate risks, ControlMaestro 2013 includes enhancements related to the management of alarms, tags and users.

New alarm systems are available to instantly report any error connecting to the database or the network, to allow fast resolution of faults. Traces files management has been also improved to facilitate the maintenance and secure the application development by providing distinct logs files per sessions.

To ensure the ongoing operations, ControlMaestro users authentication in offline mode has been reinforced by a secured mechanism so that the application is not interrupted even if LDAP server is not reachable.

In respect with security information systems, ControlMaestro also complies with the latest version of the FDA 21CFR Part11 standard (driving pharmaceutical and food industry) concerning the alarms acknowledgment with the possibility to force identification and/or add a comment.

Certification ensures a high level of expertise in the buildings management!

ControlMaestro™, the ELUTIONS’ Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition solution installed in many monitoring and control applications in the Building Management field, has been recognised as BACnet Advanced operator WorkStation (B-AWS) according to the BACnet 09 version test procedure of the BTL/WSPCert accredited laboratory.

Related to the new ControlMaestro 2013 version released this month, this Certification provides further proof of the software’s robustness and strengthens the ELUTIONS’ position in the SCADA market for building automation monitoring and control as well as their intelligent and efficient management.

In a constantly changing market more and more driven by standards and safety aspects, the ControlMaestro technological innovations enable it to provide answers in a meaningful way and to keep ahead of its competitors while providing open connectivity and supporting all common communication protocols. ControlMaestro is also compliant with the FDA21 CFR Part 11 standard for information systems security.

"Member of the BACnet Interest Group (BIG-EU), we are closely monitoring developments in the BACnet protocol that include all the features that may be encountered in the BMS space and that are constantly evolving to meet the field’s requirements.", explains Didier Pedreno, Technical Manager at ELUTIONS.

Thanks to this interoperable open protocol and to the easy configuration of all devices existing on the network(s) as well as the ability to natively access all the properties of a BACnet object without any additional tools, ControlMaestro 2013 offers maximum flexibility and optimal management of operations by enabling products and various intelligent vendor systems to exchange different data types (temperature, instructions, schedules, alerts, etc.) while increasing equipment performance. SCADA operations are easily accessible. Data sharing, scheduling, alarming and trending services are fully integrated within the SCADA system.

In this context, ControlMaestro provides valuable benefits in terms of productivity, engineering, security, user mobility and integration of third party systems.

          
Beyond the technical aspects, ControlMaestro also offers many economic benefits allowing Real Estate owners and operators to reduce operating costs and save on maintenance costs with the additional possibility to integrate the complementary solution for the energy management: Maestro™.

New SCADA platform

Major new features have been developed to improve productivity, reduce operating cost, and to increase the efficiency and the performance of the platform.

ELUTIONS has launched ControlMaestroTM 2010, the new version of its application and automation development software which dramatically improves efficiency and effectiveness for developers and users.

With this new version, many features have been added to ControlMaestro software in order to improve the SCADA platform performance and ergonomics. In particular, the new version provides a completely new trending module, the support of new operating systems, new data storage in Sql server, a virtualization support server mode and support of new Zigbee (IEC) allowing metering of energy consumption and equipment management in real time.
ELUTIONS has established itself as a premier provider of software and wireless communication assets. “ELUTIONS' wide range of solutions are supported by continuous investments in technology that drive operational CAPEX and OPEX savings”, declared Chris Guers, CEO ELUTIONS Europe.

Quick preview of new functionalities
The trending module has been totally redesigned by including a high-performance graphical interface, new configurable graph types, overlapping curves management, an automatic minimum and maximum calculation, the possibility of zooming with the mouse wheel, thus improving legibility significantly, module ergonomics and effectiveness.
ControlMaestro 2010 fully integrated SQL Server 2008 Express making unified data storage possible giving the new trending module a significant improvement in performance over other products in the market.

This new version is compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems (it is already compatible with Windows 2000 professional or server, Windows XP professional, Windows 2003 server, Windows Vista).

Thanks to Virtualization Support, ControlMaestro can now be installed on Virtual Servers using such as VMware tools... allowing servers rationalization for the users.

With a new wireless communication driver using the Zigbee protocol, ControlMaestro 2010 is able to retrieve in real-time all the data collected by its equipment, offering a global solution including hardware and software. This close link between hardware and software can provides energy consumption monitoring, and has been created in response to the actual building management problems.

The new product addresses some of the key concerns of developers of modern SCADA applications, namely rapid application development, portability and easy maintenance. All the necessary tools to develop a complete and powerful automation application are provided.

Availability
ControlMaestro 2010 is available starting October 8th, 2010 from the company ELUTIONS and its authorized distributors. Customers currently acquiring the product will be automatically able to benefit from this new version.