Various engineers, developing supervisory SCADA and HMI applications over many years, are likely to differ in their design practices. Such lack of standardisation ultimately leads to increased redesign and maintenance costs. Development Studio is an engineering environment created for the development, maintenance and management of applications. It offers a communal development environment that helps you drive standards and best practices across your business.

Development Studio offers an intuitive graphic editor that makes possible the creation of a full range of real-time process graphics and visualisations – from incredibly vivid graphics, to best-practice situational awareness symbols. Its template-based approach to HMI engineering facilitates the reuse of data across multiple applications while also encouraging the adoption of company standards. Additionally, Development Studio supports collaboration, enabling engineers, operators and IT teams to work together in creating more effective HMIs in less time.

Development Studio utilises a single, unified Plant Model that logically represents your processes, industrial systems and physical equipment, so making the design and maintenance of your HMI SCADA systems more efficient and consistent. This feature drives company-wide standards throughout your plant – or from one site to another.

Development Studio extends system lifecycle and maintainability. It does so through centralised application management and deployment in networked environments. Any modification or change applied to an application can be automatically propagated throughout the enterprise, saving engineering time, increasing consistency and minimising errors – while offering maximum flexibility.

Through its extensibility, Development Studio empowers customers to build richer applications with limitless customisation. This can be achieved by leveraging new data sources and the integration of disparate silos of information.

Development Studio also includes access to Integration Studio. This infrastructure-as-a-service development environment enables greater collaboration, rapid project creation, project archival, scalability on-demand as well as the capacity to manage multiple IS³ development projects at the same time.

The new Auto-Build feature assists engineering efficiency by reading the structure of a PLC programme and, based on the PLC schema, automatically building the Application Server templates and instances.

A communications protocol converter, Device Integration Gateway, connects clients and data sources that communicate using different protocols. It also acts as an OPC UA client. Device Integration Gateway now also supports message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol. This new feature is making device configuration, integration and interoperability simpler than ever before.

In order to facilitate increased adoption and integration of IIoT-edge device applications, free 32-tag tiny application support was introduced. This enables the integration of edge applications with 32 or fewer tags. It also enables online or System Platform connection, without the need for an additional licence.

Communication Drivers enable the consolidation of scattered architectures into fewer nodes. They facilitate the parallel independent processing of I/O by individual driver instances, which increases overall throughput or improves performance per driver and per node. A single-node license now covers as many servers as you may require in a single node.

Communication Drivers offer single-node, side-by-side upgrade capability. This unique capability makes it possible for you to upgrade to newer versions of your current drivers – without disrupting the continued operation of your legacy drivers.

Eliminate the need for restricting a single driver to a single node. It is now possible for you to run multiple, completely independent instances of the same driver on a single node. This unique feature allows for unlimited driver instances, which are restricted only by computer hardware specifications.

• An out-of-the-box, dedicated Situational Awareness Workspace offering consistent, flexible, rich context for operators – and a new way to create context-aware SCADA visualisation.
• Smoothly integrated Trending, Alarming, Interlocks and Control data, together in one interface, across multiple monitors – without any coding required.
• Assists with minimising visual distractions for operators, allowing for timeous decision-making and enabling the mitigation of risk as well as operational downtime.
• Equipment-driven interface empowers operators with holistic, real-time situational context, so helping to improve efficiency and ensure timeous corrective action.

• An out-of-the-box symbol library significantly cuts down on time building graphics, while offering the flexibility to customise objects according to your unique requirements.
• A wide range of configurable symbols adhering to industry best practices, for Situational Awareness / Abnormal Situation Management.
• Pinned windows, animated polyline vertices and named animations assist in simplifying the engineering experience.
• Advancements in new workspace concept and graphics system significantly reduces time spent creating complex layouts.

• In-built navigation zone within Workspace offers an instant visual alarm summary, with immediate focus on abnormal situations, diplaying the highest-priority alarm for a piece of equipment.
• Alarm indicators speedily draw operators’ attention, assisting in the location of the source of anomalies and associated severity.
• Alarm Shelving enables you to mute alarms temporarily for a specific time duration, or until a specified time, with the ability to re-shelve as required.
• Give operators the information they need to deal with abnormal situations by defining up to 8 Cause(s), Response(s) and Consequence(s) for your alarms.

By linking the process design output parameters from early design alternatives with the Cost Engineering Cleopatra equipment cost models, the following is allowed for:

• Process design parameters are directly fed into Cleopatra’s equipment cost models
• Rapid comparison of cost impact of various design alternatives
• Estimation of total cost of process design
• Implementation of cost control throughout the project

It provides:

• Accurate and reliable cost estimating
• Complete and transparent estimates (for example, no black boxes)
• Off-the-shelf cost data for process industries
• Benchmarking and easy comparison of your design alternatives
• Earned-value-management and integrated cost control

Integrating Cost Estimation into Process Engineering offers enormous value to our customers. This saves both time and money, by reducing the process design evaluation process.

Design parameters are applied automatically to cost models in order to estimate total installation costs. The project analytics tools in Cleopatra can then be used to select the most cost-efficient design option.

Making use of preapproved templates, all change orders are initiated from within AVEVA ProCon. The routing of change requests to the designated parties for review and authorisation is managed by configurable workflows. Identifying the effects of unforeseen change effectively allows time for scrutiny, in order to help mitigate the associated risk of cost and schedule overage, as well as potential claims.

Making use of one central system encourages on-budget and on-time construction contract delivery, as a result of all contractor interactions and issues being dealt with efficiently. In addition, full transparency of the impacts due to scope changes offers the opportunity for more effective decision-making.

Early warning indicators assist project management in directing their attention to the most critical situations, helping to reduce unplanned cost overruns. Automatic line-item reconciliation prevents erroneous payments as well as reducing the number of contract administrators required in order to process Applications for Payment.

Reminders and alerts lower the risk of missing contractual obligations, in order to help avoid claims. Should a claim arise, you will be able to easily access all correspondence for excellent claims defence.

AVEVA ProCon promotes transparency through the alignment of remote project teams with approved business processes, further enabling ease of contract award and execution.