Newton, MA – February 2, 2011 – Industrial Video and Control (IVC), a leading supplier of cameras and video systems for industrial, military, and commercial applications, announced the acquisition of Longwatch, a developer of video management software for industrial automation and process control applications. IVC, based in Newton, MA, is known for its industrial camera systems that incorporate ruggedized cameras and state-of the-art video management software.
Longwatch’s Video Surveillance system, first introduced in 2005 to water treatment and power plants, is able to transmit video over existing instrumentation networks at speeds as low as 9600 baud. Longwatch has since established itself as the leader in integrating video with industrial SCADA applications. Its Video Historian automatically links video with various user databases (including data historians). Its most recent innovation is the Longwatch Console Recorder which records industrial control console displays and enables easy playback for troubleshooting, operator training and regulatory compliance.
“The acquisition of Longwatch is a great opportunity for IVC” said Norman Fast, CEO of Industrial Video and Control. “It establishes us as the clear leader in industrial video applications. Longwatch’s leading edge software in SCADA video and remote monitoring will be a major addition to our product line and will bring extraordinary value to manufacturers and commercial users,” he added.
Stephen Rubin, CEO of Longwatch, stated “IVC makes cameras and enclosures specifically for rugged applications as demanded in process and manufacturing industries. Together, IVC and Longwatch can now deliver leading-edge solutions that deliver value that standard camera integrators cannot touch. The know-how and service capability of IVC combined with their cameras and our software brings a totally integrated, reliable solution to customers.”
H3iSquared has been the sole distributor for IV&C in Southern Africa since 2006, and has implemented the IV&C IP Camera system in various industrial sites around South Africa. With an exceptional support record, H3iSquared and IV&C are helping to bring the industrial, ITS and utility worlds over to advanced IP monitoring, providing many advantages over legacy, analogue camera setups.
Console Recorder
The Longwatch Console Recorder is a software package that enables automatic recording of your HMI or SCADA operator’s console display. This solution archives exactly what the operator was seeing, including all mouse tracks, because it records the video that’s being sent to the display itself. Playing back what the operator was seeing can be a very valuable method for troubleshooting, training and process improvement.
Being able to see exactly what the operator was seeing at any point can be a great aid when troubleshooting problems on the site, such as shutdowns caused. It can help to determine whether the operator was taking the correct actions at the correct times. This can also help to determine whether the actions taken by the operator where correctly communicated to the hardware in question by synchronising the video of the operators screen with video from a monitoring camera at the area of interest. For instance if the operator attempted to open an overflow valve yet the camera shows the actual physical valve not responding, this could indicate either a communications failure or hardware failure on the valve itself. This helps narrow down the investigation required to find the cause of a shutdown, which in the long run can lead to much lower downtime as the issues can be investigated and fixed a lot quicker once the cause has been found.
The console recorder can also prove invaluable for training purposes. Being able to view console recordings along with actual video and trending can be used to show the correct (or incorrect) way/s to deal with real live issues that could arise on a site.
The Console Recorder addresses these various points – and more – by acting like a “flight data recorder” for your plant’s cockpit – the control room. The applications that you can imagine using the Console Recorded for are endless.
Installing is quick and easy and can be done in about ten minutes. That’s right…ten minutes. Some companies say ten minutes or less could save you 10% or more, how about “ten minutes or less could reduce your downtime, help operator efficiency, help train new operators, assist in Root Cause Analysis, and assist in quality assurance.” What type of money would that save your company?
Figure 1 – Console Recorder Typical Topology
Video Historian
Having real time video of plant processes is a great tool when troubleshooting possible problems on the network, however Longwatch’s Video Historian takes this one step further. By synchronising live or recorded video streams with data historian and process databases, Video Historian allows a user to view the video along with trending of the process data on the plant. This can provide many benefits, especially when also combined with the Longwatch Console Recorder. Now you can have a FULL view of what was happening in relation to a specific process.
The benefits to troubleshooting any issues that have arisen on the plant are huge. The user can accurately track down when the problem occurred by viewing the trending database at the time of the problem. Then the video of the exact area where the problem occurred can be viewed along with the console recording of the operator screens to determine the exact cause of the issue. This accountability is essential in ensuring that the same issues do not keep repeating by allowing Engineers to make informed decisions and possible changes to the process and required reactions by operators. This process can also be used to prevent slight issues from becoming serious ones by identifying and rectifying the problems before they escalate, allowing Engineers and Operators to become PRO-Active rather than RE-Active.
The same can be said for streamlining the overall process on a plant. If the trending data shows that at certain times production is dropping in certain areas, but the camera and console proof shows that the drop in production is not related directly to those areas, Engineers can investigate synchronised footage to find out if the drop in production is being caused by a cascade effect from other, related areas.
With the ability to search for specific events based on various fields such as lot numbers, batch IDs etc. Longwatch allows for analysis of various processes at much later stages without the need to sift through hours and hours of irrelevant footage. Longwatch allows users to find and view information in the context of their own operations, rather than based on preset generic views.
IV&C
For 10 years Industrial Video & Control has been manufacturing sophisticated camera management software and rugged IP cameras for industrial, ITS, and Utility applications. With a wide range of cameras available, IV&C can provide solutions for the most demanding environments and applications. However, the strength of IV&C is not only in its top class camera hardware, but also in the strength of the camera management software that it provides.
The heart of the IV&C camera management software is the RSS, or Relay Server Software. This software is installed on a server in a central location on the network, such as the control room. Generally camera management software packages work by having the video data ‘pushed’ to them by the cameras themselves, meaning the user has very little control over the amount of traffic being generated on the network. For this reason network administrators are often very hesitant about allowing cameras to be placed on the production or control networks, due to the concern of the video traffic bottlenecking sections of the network and thus blocking the more critical process and control data from arriving in a timely fashion. However installing a new physical network requires a large amount of CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) and also doubles the amount of OPEX (Operational Expenditure) and maintenance required on the network, as well as greatly increasing the workload as now two networks have to be monitored and maintained.
IV&C’s RSS addresses this problem by working in reverse to most other management softwares, i.e. by allowing the RSS to ‘pull’ the data from the cameras at a predefined rate. This means that the amount of data being pulled can be easily managed from the RSS by dropping the fps (Frames per Second, or framerate) of the video streams. In many cases on production and control networks low framerates in the region of 2-4 fps can be used. For instance when a camera needs to simply inform an operator that a conveyor belt has started, a framerate of even as low as 1 fps can be used. As often cameras will push their data at a rate of 10 fps or higher, in this case we are experiencing a drop in traffic of 90% or more.
As this framerate limiting can be done on a per camera basis the system can be tweaked to provide the viewing footage needed whilst still preventing the video footage from overwhelming the backbone network. This framerate limiting can also be done separately for recording vs. viewing, as well as for LAN vs. WAN streaming.
Often when using a camera system, every time someone wishes to view a camera a separate video stream will be opened between the user and the camera. This can cause network bottlenecks, especially to cameras on the far edge of the network, when multiple viewers wish to view the camera. This can cause severe problems as once again these bottlenecks could prevent the timely transmission of critical data on the network.
With the IV&C system, viewers will pull there camera feeds from the RSS rather than the cameras themselves. This means that there will only be a single stream open between each camera and the RSS, meaning much less traffic on the edges of the network where bandwidth availability may be more limited than on the backbone.
Using just the RSS, users can view the camera feeds using a standard internet browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, without the need for installing client programs on each viewing PC. This also allows users to view the feeds using any device that can support an internet browser, such as smart phones and tablets.
IV&C does however provide a second, optional piece of software that can add a range of added features, including alarming, touring and advanced searching for specific camera feeds. This software application is known as the VSS, or View Station Software. Using this software, users can customise the viewing environment to meet their requirements, adding sections not only for viewing live or recorded feeds, but also for buttons to send certain commands to cameras or other devices on the network, panoramas for simply control of PTZ camera and advanced searching and playback tools for recorded camera feeds.
In today’s world of IP networks, the possibility is available for more advanced camera systems than previous legacy analogue systems. IV&C is one of the leaders in IP camera solutions, and the benefits provided by using a professional, well commissioned camera network should not be underestimated. Proper camera management systems such as IV&C and Longwatch can not only provide security and safety monitoring on a site, but can also be used to increase production and control, and should not be overlooked. For more information on Longwatch or IV&C please contact H3iSquared.
Tim Craven, H3iSquared
Tel: +27 (0)11 454 6025
Website: www.h3isquared.com
Live Camera Demo: http://h3isquared.dyndns.org
Email: info@h3isquared.com