This is regarding the implementation of the following:

We are a Oil and Gas Processing Industry, where we have various DCS's & PLC Systems..... We have ABB, Siemens, Honeywell and SpeedTronics MARK VI, MARK II and MARK V systems for various processes & equipments in the Plant.....

These controls systems are located in control rooms scattered all over the Plant.....

The requirement is to send a SMS to a particular Mobile Phone(s) whenever any equipment being controlled by these systems fail/trip......

What is the simplest way to achieve this....?? Should this functionality be achieved using one vendor's GSM card 'somehow' integrated with every other control system or a GSM card for each control system will be required separately......??? Request users and implementers to kindly share their experiences about such a system.....

au revoir
Rahul P Sharma

 

Look for Specter Instruments WIN-911 software. It is a robust OPC client that will monitor configured alarm & events from OPC servers and will send messages on various manners, including emails & SMS. It has a watchdog function that will monitor heartbeat from each server and send a comm. alarm if comm. is bad.

Hope this help.

 

Thanks for the reply..... I checked Specter Instruments website and could also locate a local representative of Specter Instruments...... But from your description I understand that to interface a system like WIN-911, it would require a OPC server to collect data from DCS/PLCs of various makes......

Not all systems at our Plant are OPC compliant or even DCS/PLC based..... and currently, we don't have OPC servers to feed data to WIN-911..... Some are even relay based logic systems for Boilers, Air Compressors, Air Handling Units etc..... To upgrade all these systems to OPC compliant Control Systems would not be feasible right away......

In view of this is it possible to have some kind of an architecture whereby a Digital Contact from the trip relay is taken from each equipment and interfaced to a Digital Input Card of, say, an existing Honeywell/ABB/Siemens DCS-PLC system and then add a 'GSM card' (if it exists) to that DCS and use it to send the messages......

Regards

au revoir
Rahul P Sharma

 

Hello,

PeakHMI might fit your needs. It can send emails/SMS text.

From the help file:

The HMI can use emails to send notifications to email accounts and/or SMS text to cell phones.

Many cell providers provide an SMS/email gateway.

Good luck,

Mark
http://www.peakhmi.com/

 

You are putting the cart before the horse. The control systems don't need to be "OPC compliant". OPC has to be "compliant" with the control system. To be more specific, OPC is just a type of interface between a program (e.g. WIN-911) and a protocol driver. The PLC neither knows nor cares how that program talks to its driver. It's the PLC's communications protocol that matters. It would for example be WIN-911 that needs the OPC driver. If it had any direct drivers of its own there would be no need for any OPC software at all.

Some PLCs have communications cards which allow them to send e-mails. Some e-mail systems will forward short e-mail messages via SMS. You should talk to whoever is looking after your IT systems (including the e-mail) as to what they can do as they may have options available that are much cheaper than direct to SMS would be (depending on the contract with the mobile phone provider). That can also give you better message forwarding options so that each user can control which messages get forwarded to SMS and when they're forwarded or just held as e-mail.

If some of your control systems don't have any means of communications available, then you'll have to add hardware. There's no way around that problem. One thing you can do there is to add some small remote I/O modules to those systems and bring them back to a suitable PLC, or PC program.

 

Well I don't know about your Honeywell or Siemens systems, but if you have 800xA operator stations on your ABB control systems then you already have this functionality available.

For equipment that has no PLC or DCS attached, then yes, you will need to feed back the tripped status to a PLC or control system input somewhere, and then transfer it somehow to your chosen GSM alert system. And in general OPC is usually the best way to do this.

Rob
www[.]lymac.co.nz

 

Try U.C.ME-OPC. It can connect to your system via OPC. It can send SMS, Email and Voice messages to any cell phone. See more at www.controlsee.com. You may download an evaluation copy and see how it works. You may create escalations, acknowledge alarms via SMS and query/change field values via SMS.

Regards,
Michael

 

Have a look at this lot

http://www.copadata.com/en/products...u1&PHPSESSID=f4d8529c0da9bac065b8511e1e201f3f

they are a austrian company the product is fab, takes some getting used to though as its OO based not a legacy. They have a message control module with main product which will do what you are after and drivers for all the DCS/PLC's mentioned.

The demo licensee that comes with the download allows for unrestricted use but demands a restart every 40 minutes in development only , not runtime.

I previously worked for Siemens, Honeywell and AB as an engineer and this product is better than all by far, in fact siemens oem the product ;-) as do Krones, and BMW have it as there international standard