GFK-1189R

GE Fanuc Automation

GE Fanuc Automation North America, Inc.

1 Columbia Circle
Albany NY 12203-5189
Phone: 518-464-4500

CIMPLICITY® HMI Plant Edition™ Version 5.5

The leader in plant wide supervisory monitoring and control solutions.
Important New Features
GE Fanuc is pleased to announce the availability of CIMPLICITY® HMI - Plant Edition™
Version 5.5. CIMPLICITY HMI continues to lead the competition in features and functionality
making it the most powerful industrial automation software available on the planet. With HMI
you can easily build and tailor a systems to meet your precise monitoring and control needs,
while providing an infrastructure to support your supply chain collaboration needs.
CIMPLICITY HMI Plant Edition now easily integrates with the CIMPLICITY Machine Edition
View product in a true client / server architecture. In addition, this new version introduces a
complete suite of new features as well as ease of use enhancements.
CIMPLICITY Web Browser Interface
CIMPLICITY has added a new web browser interface to the product to organize and centralize
the way you access your CIMPLICITY information via the web.

Point
Reports
Web based
Alarm
Viewer

Alarm
Reports

WebView
Screens
Terminal
Services

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This new web browser interface provides a whole new look and feel to the way you can access
WebView. It also provides a way to access the new Terminal Services product option described
later in the bulletin. In addition, through the web browser interface, you can access the power of
an XML Server for providing Point and Alarm data reports.
Accessing the web browser interface is easy. With your internet browser open, you enter the
network name of your PC in the address field and you are presented with the new CIMPLICITY
integrated web based environment. The CIMPLICITY browser interface will automatically
explore the network for other CIMPLICITY projects. You can then select to view all the
CIMPLICITY projects on the network. By selecting a particular project you can then generate
an XML based Point or Alarm Snapshot Report with a click of the mouse. Interested in viewing
screens from a particular project? Simply view the list of the screens, select the one of interest,
click on the name and a WebView screen will open in the browser and present you a dynamic,
interactive view of your CIMPLICITY screen. No pre-configuration or conversion of your
CIMPLICITY screens is required. From here you have the full power of WebView where you
can view and, with proper privileges configured, perform setpoint actions to control your
process. Experience the power of CIMPLICITY over the web!
CIMPLICITY’s web based interface product options, WebView and Terminal Services, can
reduce your total cost of ownership in several ways. Since there is no CIMPLICITY software
loaded on the client computers, maintenance costs are reduced by eliminating the need to load
extra software on potentially hundreds of computers. WebView and Terminal Services use
separate concurrent licensing that can also drastically reduce purchase costs by allowing licenses
to be shared between casual users. As soon as a user is done the license is immediately freed up
to be used by the next user.
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CIMPLICITY HMI Terminal Services Support – New Product Option

CIMPLICITY HMI introduces a new product option with Version 5.5 – HMI Terminal Services.
GE Fanuc has been on the leading edge providing the widest variety of ways for you to visualize
your plant floor information with products such as WebView and ThinView. Now, HMI
Terminal Services extends the product offering to provide another easy to use, low
administration cost solution for visualizing your information.
HMI Terminal Services is built to take advantage of the Microsoft Terminal Services product.
Microsoft Terminal Services is a product developed for Windows 2000 to deploy a thin client
solution to deliver 32-bit Windows to a wide range of desktop hardware devices. Terminal
Services combines the low cost of a terminal with the benefits of a managed Windows-based
environment and offers the same low cost, centrally managed environment of the traditional
mainframe with terminals, but adds the familiarity, ease of use, and breadth of applications
support offered by the Windows operating system platform.

GE Fanuc Automation of North America, Inc

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The benefit that this delivers is that now you can view and interact with your CIMPLICITY HMI
application from a computer without any CIMPLICITY software loaded on it. The
CIMPLICITY application resides on a central HMI server and your screens, Point Control Panel,
and even the configuration Workbench is served out to you. This is similar to the CIMPLICITY
WebView product, but provides you access to applications outside of CimView.
The Conservation Of Fat - As Clients Become Thinner, Servers Become Fatter

There is a trade-off to a thin client / server architecture versus a traditional client / server
architecture. With traditional clients such as a CIMPLICITY Viewer, the processing for that
local user occurs on the local computer and you are using the horsepower of that machine to
draw your screens. Only the point information needed to update the screens is transmitted over
the network to the Viewer.
In a thin client architecture, the processing for the screens and all the user’s interaction shifts to
the central server. To handle these multiple users, the central server must be sized accordingly.
There is also a performance impact with using Thin Clients since all the information required to
paint and update the user’s screen must be transmitted from the server to the thin client. The
benefit to the thin client architecture is that there is no local software that needs to be upgraded
or changed. The thin client receives its information from the application on the server.
Depending on the application and screens being displayed, up to 50 HMI Terminal Services
clients can be supported from a dedicated server. GE Fanuc recommends a minimum of a 900
MHZ Pentium III with at least 256 MB of RAM. An HMI 75 I/O Runtime License can be used
to support this Terminal Services Server.
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The following chart is provided to help outline some of the differences between the
CIMPLICITY visualization products.
CIMPLICITY Viewer WebView Terminal Services

CimView (Screens) Yes Yes Yes

CIMPLICITY Point Yes No Yes

Applications (Point
Control Panel)

Development Yes No Yes

Configuration
(Development Viewer)

HMI Software Yes No No

Loaded on Local PC

Dedicated User Yes Depends on Depends on

Application performance performance
requirements requirements

Licensing Dedicated Concurrent (shared) Concurrent (shared)

Remote Application Yes – Development No Yes – internet /

Support Viewer or Server and intranet connection
RAS connection required
When speed and performance is required and the user is on the same local network as the server,
a CIMPLICITY Viewer is an excellent choice. For plant floor users who are constantly
interacting with CIMPLICITY, a Viewer is a natural selection.
WebView and HMI Terminal Services provide the benefit of concurrent licensing. This allows a
license to be used by one user, and when they are done, the license is immediately freed up for
another user. Therefore, both WebView and HMI Terminal Services provide an excellent
solution for remote or casual users who need periodic access to the information provided by
HMI. HMI Terminal Services provides more functionality than WebView since applications
outside of CimView are supported including remote configuration.
As mentioned before, HMI Terminal Services requires the Microsoft Terminal Services product.
Licenses for Microsoft Terminal Services can be obtained from Microsoft or their distributors.

GE Fanuc Automation of North America, Inc

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Network Integration with CIMPLICITY Machine Edition

The family of CIMPLICITY software products has grown stronger than ever with the
introduction of HMI Plant Edition 5.5 and Machine Edition 2.1. Now, HMI users can easily
browse for points from Machine Edition View projects. Integration is easy since the Machine
Edition View projects will appear as CIMPLICITY projects on the network by broadcasting their
project name. The CIMPLICITY HMI point applications (CimView, Point Panel, etc) will be
able to directly access point data from the Machine Edition View computers simply by
referencing fully qualified points. From the perspective of the CIMPLICITY Viewer the
Machine Edition node appears like a CIMPLICITY HMI Plant Edition Server. This unique
layered architecture allows you to take full advantage of the complete CIMPLICITY product line
to tackle the toughest applications and apply the right product for the right solution.

CIMPLICITY Plant Edition

Point Control Panel

Point Data

Machine Edition
View
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CimView Parent-Child Windows

This new feature makes it much easier to fully use the multi-window environment of
CIMPLICITY HMI while making it easy to manage it as well.

CimView Relative Screen Positioning

A new feature has been added to CimView that allows you to specify the opening position of a
new child screen relative to objects on the main parent CimView screen. This allows child
windows to be positioned relative to the parent window to a location that you specify. This is
another feature that helps you tap into the true power of HMI’s multi-window environment while
making it easy to manage and maintain.

CimView Initial Variable Values

A new feature has been added to CimView that allows you to specify the initial value for
variables in a screen that is being opened. This allows you to create parameterized (templated)
screens with initial starting values.

CimView Linked Object Performance

Runtime linked objects' performance now uses about the same amount of CPU as non-linked
objects.

GE Fanuc Automation of North America, Inc

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Level Based Security

CIMPLICITY HMI provides a robust set of security features regarding the ability of users to
perform setpoints. With Version 5.5 User Role Level based setpoint security has been added.
Each user role can now have a numeric level assigned to it. Likewise, each point can have a
numeric level assigned to it. If you enable level based security then the user must have a level
greater than or equal to the point level in order to set it.

Rapid Historical Trend Retrieval

The CIMPLICITY Trend control has been enhanced to provide rapid retrieval of a large time
span of data.To support this, the CIMPLICITY Data log table indexes are now optimized for
Historical Trending data retrieval speed. Plotting data from Data logs and Group logs is now
equally as fast. The Trend can also adjust and aggregate the display of the data for things such as
min, max, and average values over a period of time. The enhanced Trending Control can provide
you with a recommended time base sampling resolution based on the number of entries in the
table that fall within the time span. With this functionality, you can specify automatic server side
data compression where by the control can calculate the maximum number of data points that
can be plotted within the X axis time span and automatically determine the time based sampling
resolution.
Historical Trending line compression has also been enhanced for speed by giving you the option
of off loading the compression onto the database server, thus reducing the amount of network
throughput required. This is especially useful when trending data over a long time span on a
very large data set. You can choose from average, minimum, maximum, first, and last aggregate
functions and specify the interval in which the chosen aggregate is computed.

Alarm Blinking
With HMI 5.5 you can now configure your alarms to blink and at different rates. When you
configure alarms in CIMPLICITY you assign them an Alarm Class, which corresponds to the
priority of the alarm. Now when you configure the Alarm Class colors you can specify a blink
rate in tenths of a second for each of the alarm states (Alarm, Ack, Normal). You can also select
what the blink foreground and background colors will be for each of the states. To ease and
simplify configuration, the colors are initially set to the inverse of the selected foreground and
background colors.
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Data Logging Millisecond Time Field

Many of today’s databases’ time fields do not support sub-second logging. Database logging has
been enhanced to add a new column in the database table where the sub-second component of
the timestamp will be logged. It also provides exact timestamp information in supported DBMSs
whose date/time data type supports sub-second fractions but not to millisecond resolution. The
CIMPLICITY Trend control has also been enhanced to accommodate querying this field and
combines it with the timestamp field to provide a single timestamp with millisecond resolution.

Configuration Automation Interfaces

CIMPLICITY HMI provides you with almost unlimited power to configure your system through
its Configuration Automation Interfaces. The Automation Interfaces allow you to make changes
to project configuration through scripting while a project is running. With HMI 5.5 additional
interfaces have been added to the CIMPLICITY Configuration Automation Model for
configuring Users, Roles, Resources, and Global Parameters.

ThinView ViewStation CE Support

ThinView is a thin client technology that GE Fanuc developed for viewing CIMPLICITY
screens on CE devices. Two award winning products, PocketView and TabletView use this thin
client software to access information from CIMPLICITY Servers. Now, with HMI Version 5.5
we have added ThinView support for the CIMPICITY ViewStation CE devices. When it comes
to visualizing the information from your plant floor monitoring and control systems, no one else
matches the wide range of flexible solutions available from GE Fanuc.

GE Fanuc Automation of North America, Inc

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5.5

Project Wizard Support for Modbus RTU

The CIMPLICITY Project Wizard makes setting up and configuring a new system a breeze. One
of the unique features of the Project Wizard is that it can detect and automatically configure
points for GE Fanuc PLCs. With the new release of 5.5 we have added the ability to
automatically detect and configure Modbus RTU devices on Modbus Serial networks as well.

When you run the Wizard it provides you with a list of available protocols that are installed on
the system. Once you select the protocols you will be using for the project, the Wizard will go
out and automatically detect all the GE Fanuc Ethernet enabled PCs or Modbus Serial Devices
on the networks. You can then select the devices you want to communicate with, and specify the
data ranges within the device. The Wizard can then automatically configure all the device points
for you. Setup has never been easier!
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GagePort Mitutoyo OPC Server – Product Option

A new stand-alone OPC Server for GagePort and Mitutoyo devices has been introduced. The
server supports Mitutoyo GagePort, FlexPort, and MIG2 gage hubs with any number of hub
ports. It also supports any simple serial device that sends its data in an unsolicited manner
through an RS-232 connection (such as a bar code reader). The server uses XML as its native
configuration file format. The Microsoft XML Document Object Model parser (distributed with
IE5) is used to insure XML file integrity. When launched by OLE, the server runs hidden as a
resident process, allowing it to continue running when no user is logged into the workstation.

OMRON TCP-IP Device Communications

The Omron TCP/IP device communications module has been enhanced to provide support for
Omron CS1 PLCs.

Craig Thorsland
Visualization Manager
Phone: 518-464-4562
Fax: 518-464-4613
E-mail: Craig.Thorsland@gefalbany.ge.com

CIMPLICITY is a registered trademark of GE Fanuc Automation, NA.

Plant Edition and Machine Edition are trademarks of GE Fanuc Automation, NA.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

GE Fanuc Automation of North America, Inc