The following guide contains a brief description of the major innovations introduced in SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1, suggestions for optimized product use and other general information. Therefore, we recommend that you carefully read the contents herein. According to law, Siemens AG reserves the rights inherent to the property of this document, prohibiting its reproduction (either in full or in part) and its disclosure in any form to third parties or competitors without written authorization. Although great care has been taken in compiling this document to ensure that the information contained herein is correct, no guarantee or warranty is given or implied. The policy of Siemens AG is to constantly improve its products. Therefore, Siemens AG reserves the right to make any changes to the product in question without prior notice.
Before You Start.................................................................................................................. 10
Important Notes................................................................................................................... 11 Upgrading from previous versions ................................................................................... 11 Licenses ............................................................................................................................ 11 Software Localization....................................................................................................... 11 Compatibility with previous versions............................................................................... 11 UOM Management ........................................................................................................... 11 DTC support ..................................................................................................................... 12 Product Uninstall .............................................................................................................. 12
Installing the Software ........................................................................................................ 14 Production Suite Components .......................................................................................... 14 Before you start ................................................................................................................ 15 New setup structure .......................................................................................................... 15 Software requirements...................................................................................................... 16 Operating-system localization .......................................................................................... 17 Use of SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 with other Siemens products...................... 17 Microsoft Security HotFixes ............................................................................................ 18 Interaction with .NET applications .................................................................................. 20 Interaction with 3rd-party tools ......................................................................................... 20
Remote Control............................................................................................................ 20 Disk Backup and Disaster Recovery utilities .............................................................. 21 Time synchronization tools.......................................................................................... 21 Antivirus ...................................................................................................................... 21
Note on SIMATIC® IT Report Manager:......................................................................... 22 Note on MS SQLServer Installation................................................................................. 22 Note on Components database management .................................................................... 23
Database creation or update during installation .......................................................... 23 Database management ................................................................................................. 23 Login Password change ............................................................................................... 24 When Restoring a Backup Database............................................................................ 24 Single Database vs. Separate Databases...................................................................... 24 Should SQL SERVER Database Reside on a Separate Machine? .............................. 24 Very important Warnings regarding SQLServer Configuration ................................. 24 Filegroup configuration ............................................................................................... 25
Documentation languages ................................................................................................ 28 SIMATIC® IT Production Suite system documentation .................................................. 28 Components Technical Overview manual (English)........................................................ 28 Known Issues.................................................................................................................... 29
UNICODE support ........................................................................................................... 30 DTC support ..................................................................................................................... 30 GSI interfaces ................................................................................................................... 30 UTC support ..................................................................................................................... 30 UOM Server ..................................................................................................................... 30 Configuration.................................................................................................................... 30
SIMATIC® IT Services 5.0 ................................................................................................ 31 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 31
PCS7 Tag Browser....................................................................................................... 31 User Change on Citrix ................................................................................................. 31 User Change on Terminal Server client (Remote Desktop Connection)..................... 31 IPC Communication port ............................................................................................. 31 MSM Display Client on Http environmental............................................................... 31 Proxy Configuration .................................................................................................... 32 SIMATIC Logon.......................................................................................................... 32 Compliance Services upgrade...................................................................................... 32 Internal tools ................................................................................................................ 32 Standard User Manager ............................................................................................... 32 Notes for Web installation ........................................................................................... 33 Chinese language ......................................................................................................... 33 Compliance service...................................................................................................... 33
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 33 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 33
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 33 Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 34
Stand Alone Mode ....................................................................................................... 34 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 34
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 34 Terminal Server support for Basic Client station ........................................................ 34 Cab Protocol Configurator........................................................................................... 35 Lock Object Server ...................................................................................................... 35 Compliance Service ..................................................................................................... 35 Messaging Manager..................................................................................................... 35 PCS7 Tag Browser....................................................................................................... 35
SIMATIC® IT CAB 1.1...................................................................................................... 36 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 36
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 37 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 37
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 37 Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 37
Regional settings mismatch ......................................................................................... 38 Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 38
CAB Web Server and CAB Server machine name problems...................................... 38 CAB Script Editor and keyboard shortcuts ................................................................. 38 How to make a Session survive its natural timeout without user interaction.............. 38 Known Technical Issues (CAB) .................................................................................. 41
SIMATIC® IT BPM 5.0 ..................................................................................................... 42 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 42
Setting the Plant in SIMATIC IT Production Modeler as “CURRENT”.................... 42 How to change the Pcell link to another BATCH UNIT............................................. 42 Deleting a Plant............................................................................................................ 42 Production Modeler server indication ......................................................................... 42
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 42 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 43
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 43 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 43
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 44 Material Configuration ................................................................................................ 44 Incremental Import in PPA.......................................................................................... 44 Default name for Process Segment (or Production Operation) Rules of Rules........... 44 Hierarchy of the Process Segment (or Production Operation) Rules of Rules............ 44 Download of PS/Po hierarchies ................................................................................... 44 Association Between PO and Final Material............................................................... 44
SIMATIC® IT PM 5.0........................................................................................................ 45 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 45
Libraries and Plant upgrade ......................................................................................... 45 KPIs assigned to objects shared with SIMATIC® BATCH......................................... 45 Plant download on BPM.............................................................................................. 46 Authorizing PM ........................................................................................................... 46 License insertion.......................................................................................................... 46 Process segment notes ................................................................................................. 47 Transactional Rules notes ............................................................................................ 47 Update of old wording ................................................................................................. 47 Date Management in PM COM Interface.................................................................... 48 Launching Developer Clients ...................................................................................... 48 Implicit Materials configuration .................................................................................. 49 Start segment configuration......................................................................................... 49
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 49
Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 50 Documentation ................................................................................................................. 50 Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 50
PM Display .................................................................................................................. 50 Debug Mode ................................................................................................................ 50 Old analysis elements .................................................................................................. 50
What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 50 Distributed Transactions Support ................................................................................ 50 New Components interface.......................................................................................... 51 Version number “x.y” .................................................................................................. 52 New Versioning concept.............................................................................................. 53 New Palettes organization ........................................................................................... 53 New functions available .............................................................................................. 58 Incremental synchronization........................................................................................ 58 Unicode Support .......................................................................................................... 59 PM Language configuration in SIT Mgmt Console .................................................... 59 Multiple selection of libraries or Plants during loading .............................................. 59 Recovery From crash ................................................................................................... 59 New Configuration parameters for Recovery.............................................................. 60 Unsolicited tag reading from GSI-RTDS .................................................................... 61 Possibility to feedback KPI calculation result to PM .................................................. 61 Possibility to stop/abort/pause an Entry in SIMATIC IT Production Order Manager ....................................................................................................................... 62 Definition of Process Segments in PM and PDefM .................................................... 62 Licensing Management................................................................................................ 63 XML support................................................................................................................ 64 Expressions on PM rule caller ..................................................................................... 64 New Caption of PM server window ............................................................................ 64 Multi COM Interface ................................................................................................... 64
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 65 PM Server .................................................................................................................... 65 PM COM Interface ...................................................................................................... 65 PM Display .................................................................................................................. 66
SIMATIC® IT DIS 1.1 ....................................................................................................... 67 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 67
Installation ................................................................................................................... 67 Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 67
Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 67 Documentation ................................................................................................................. 67 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 67
New DIS COMConnector interface............................................................................. 67 New way to communicate with PM............................................................................. 68 New connectors............................................................................................................ 68
New DIS Kernel features............................................................................................. 68 Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 68
Features Not Currently Supported ............................................................................... 68 SIMATIC® IT PDefM 1.0.................................................................................................. 69
Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 69 SQL Server Agent........................................................................................................ 69 PDefM specification .................................................................................................... 69 Reworking loop............................................................................................................ 69
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 69 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 69
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 69 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 69 Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 70
Ambiguous product hierarchy ..................................................................................... 70 Material names restrictions.......................................................................................... 70 Loop flag...................................................................................................................... 70 Usage of Decimal Separator in Methods ..................................................................... 70
SIMATIC® IT POM 5.0..................................................................................................... 71 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 71
Development language ................................................................................................ 71 Deployed modules ....................................................................................................... 71 New COM interface..................................................................................................... 71 COM interface for PM................................................................................................. 71 Interface Methods Return Codes ................................................................................. 71 Restriction on modules usage ...................................................................................... 72 PDefM specification .................................................................................................... 72
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 72 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 72
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 72 Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 72
Control BOM ............................................................................................................... 72 POM BOM Item Information ...................................................................................... 72
What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 73 Process Segment vs PO................................................................................................ 73 PPR’s vs Order Templates........................................................................................... 73 Multi-value Custom Fields .......................................................................................... 73 Categories for Custom Field ........................................................................................ 73 Custom Field Type Constraints and Default Value..................................................... 73 Instantiation of an Order from a PPR Defined in Simatic It PDEFM ......................... 74 Health-Check on a PPR for Creating an Order............................................................ 74 Family and type on order/entry.................................................................................... 74 Closer Integration with PM ......................................................................................... 75 DTC Support................................................................................................................ 75 UTC Support................................................................................................................ 75 Unicode Support .......................................................................................................... 75 Return error codes........................................................................................................ 75
Log of custom field...................................................................................................... 75 Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 76
Specification properties ............................................................................................... 76 Specification parameters.............................................................................................. 76 Upgraded Entities ........................................................................................................ 76 Dependencies ............................................................................................................... 76 Orders and Entries of the “new” Type......................................................................... 77 Customization of the Entry-Id ..................................................................................... 77 Material Specifications ................................................................................................ 77 Equipment Specifications ............................................................................................ 77 Parameters.................................................................................................................... 77 Split Operation on Entries ........................................................................................... 77 Gantt Chart................................................................................................................... 78 Log of custom field migration ..................................................................................... 78
SIMATIC® IT MM 5.0....................................................................................................... 79 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 79
Backup/Restore over remote workstation.................................................................... 79 Decimal properties....................................................................................................... 79
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 79 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 79
Documentation ................................................................................................................. 79 Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 79
BoM versioning management...................................................................................... 79 Material Definition management ................................................................................. 80
What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 80 DTC Support................................................................................................................ 80 Closer Integration with PM ......................................................................................... 80 UTC Support................................................................................................................ 80 Unicode Support .......................................................................................................... 80 Versioning and Life Cycle........................................................................................... 80 Multilanguage for GUI, components and ActiveXs .................................................... 81 Set of values for Properties.......................................................................................... 81 Time Stamp for method/event ..................................................................................... 81 Only One Standard GUI for RunTime......................................................................... 81 Methods with Advanced search mechanism................................................................ 82 Material Property Grouping......................................................................................... 82 Locking enhancement in Material Manager ................................................................ 82 Alternative BoM .......................................................................................................... 82 Material Definition visible in Location View.............................................................. 82 Material Grouping ....................................................................................................... 82 Unit of Measure conversion......................................................................................... 82 Material Manager Display split ................................................................................... 83 Commit to field enhancement...................................................................................... 83 Lots status propagation on sub-lots ............................................................................. 83
Bill of Material in Material Definition ........................................................................ 83 Simultaneous visualization of Backward and Forward Genealogy............................. 83 Validity date for Lots/SubLots .................................................................................... 84 Product Definition Manager Support........................................................................... 84 Database views for Report Manager............................................................................ 84 Transform and Move Out in one step .......................................................................... 84 Transform and Move In in one step............................................................................. 84
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 85 Duplicated equipment names....................................................................................... 85 HUT Locked/Reserved Statuses .................................................................................. 85 Common Locations...................................................................................................... 85 Configuration files ....................................................................................................... 85 Display limitation ........................................................................................................ 86 Child Bill of Material................................................................................................... 86 Lot and Sublot identification restriction ...................................................................... 86 Default values for methods parameters ....................................................................... 86
SIMATIC® IT PRM 2.0 ..................................................................................................... 89 Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 89
Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 89 Documentation ................................................................................................................. 89 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 89
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 90 Common Data Configuration / Configuration and Presentation Client....................... 90 Common Data Configuration....................................................................................... 91
SIMATIC® IT BSM 2.0 ..................................................................................................... 92 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 92
Well-known services port numbers configuration....................................................... 92 Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 92
Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 92 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 92
SIMATIC® IT POPR 5.0 ................................................................................................... 93 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 93
Installing the Software...................................................................................................... 93 Hardware and software Requirements......................................................................... 93
Obsolete features .............................................................................................................. 94 What’s New ...................................................................................................................... 94
Versioning - POPR to log the usage of the versions ................................................... 94 Closer Integration with PM ......................................................................................... 94 Multilanguage for GUI, components and ActiveXs - Contextual text to support UNICODE ................................................................................................................... 94 Definition of Process Segments and Production Steps in PM and PDefM ................. 94 Windows terminal server support ................................................................................ 94 Unique Database for MCOCore and MCOProd .......................................................... 94
Known Technical Issues................................................................................................... 95 Unicode support........................................................................................................... 95 Problems under heavy load situation........................................................................... 95 MS Office compatibility .............................................................................................. 95 Visualization limitation ............................................................................................... 95 Upgrading from older version...................................................................................... 95
SIMATIC® IT CIB 2.0 ....................................................................................................... 96 Important Notes ................................................................................................................ 96
Welcome to the world of SIMATIC IT. In modern plants, coordinating and synchronizing different parts of the enterprise is what determines success. The manufacturing process is distributed where it is convenient (outside the plant or even outside the enterprise). Being able to manage its growing complexity is thus a key factor to successful installation.
SIMATIC IT is the software environment that permits managing such complex systems. A Framework models the entire Supply Chain and then directly synchronizes and coordinates the activities of all the components defined in the model. A group of several components is dedicated to performing specific actions in order to achieve the manufacturing goals (scheduling, batch management, data manipulation and archiving and so forth). Since the first release of SIMATIC IT, development has been centered on improving the product’s core, introducing new features and new components, as well as exploiting up-and-coming, innovative technologies in step with the frenetic evolution of Information Technology. We strongly believe in continuously developing our software environment: likewise, we are convinced that such development must include all of our customers’ requirements. For this reason, we kindly ask that you please provide any suggestions or comments you feel may aid us in improving our platform.
Before You Start
For a complete guide to installation, please refer to the appropriate Installation manual available on the product CD-Rom. To read .PDF files, the installation of Acrobat Reader is provided in the product setup CD-Rom.
Please refer to the upgrade documentation available in the Upgrade directory found in the installation CD-ROM.
Licenses
This version is completely integrated with Siemens Automation License Manager. For this reason, the hardware key is no longer necessary. For further details about License installation and management, please refer to the Automation License Manager Help.
Software Localization
Version 6.1 is provided with a complete and tested user interface and online help in German and English. French, Italian and Spanish user interfaces and online helps for SIMATIC IT Services are not provided in this version and will be supplied in a subsequent Service Pack.
Compatibility with previous versions
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 has introduced several new functionalities and a substantial set of updates for improving system performance and stability. This is the reason why SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 presents some incompatibilities with respect to previous versions. The descriptions and the reasons in merit to such are illustrated in the “Compatibility_Tracknig.pdf” document.
UOM Management
Unit Of Measure management is centralized for all SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 Components. This means that there exists a central repository for all UOMs: as a result, any change made to UOMs via any component interface is valid for all components.
Distributed transaction can be initiated, committed or rolled-back only by Production Modeler through specialized rules. Component interfaces accept a transaction cookie provided by Production Modeler in order to participate in the transaction. Transaction-cookie generation by other actors than Production Modeler can lead to unpredictable behavior and is thus not supported.
Product Uninstall
In order to guarantee that the product be uninstalled correctly, the modules must be uninstalled in the following order: • Client
• PRS Database Management • BSM • PDefM Display • PDefM COM Wrapper • BPM Configurator • BPM Display • MM Client • DIS Client • POM Display • POPR Display • POPR Display ActiveX • PM COM Interface • PRM Administrator • PRM Client • PM Developer Client • CAB Web Server • (*) Full Services Or (**) Client Services
• Server
• CAB Server • BPM Server • PM Server • CIB Compact • CIB Distributed-KB • CIB Distributed-Exe • DIS Server • MM Server • PDefM Server • POM Server • POPR Server • PRM Server
Each CD-Rom provided contains an Autorun file that allows you to automatically launch the Setup program upon inserting the CD into its Drive. In any case, a Setup program (INSTi386.bat) can be found in the root directory of the CD-Rom. Before installing the product, we strongly recommend that you close all open applications and save all important data and programs, even though all necessary precautions have been taken to render the software that has been provided safe.
Production Suite Components
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 is made up of: • SIMATIC® IT Services 5.0 • SIMATIC® License Manager • SIAMTIC® Logon • SIMATIC® IT Client Application Builder (CAB) 1.1 • SIMATIC® IT Business Process Modeler (BPM) 5.0 • SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler (PM) 5.0 • SIMATIC® IT Data Integration Service (DIS) 1.1 • SIMATIC® IT Product Definition Manager (PdefM) 1.0 • SIMATIC® IT Production Order Manager (POM) 5.0 • SIMATIC® IT Material Manager (MM) 5.0 • SIMATIC® IT Personnel Resource Manager (PRM) 2.0
• SIMATIC® IT Barcode Scanner Manager (BSM) 2.0 • SIMATIC® IT Production Operation Recorder (POPR) 5.0 • SIMATIC® IT COM Interface for SIMATIC BATCH (CIB) 2.0
Before you start
If you are installing SIMATIC IT |Production Suite V6.1 over an existing previous installation, please read the “SIMATIC IT Installation Upgrade” technical notes (available in the \Documentation folder of the setup CD-ROM) carefully. As the installation path and procedure differ significantly from previous installations, failing to follow the exact installation upgrade procedure may result in serious malfunctioning.
New setup structure
As of SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1, the setup procedure has changed. It is based on standard Microsoft MSI packages: all installed components displayed in the Windows list of installed applications, allowing the user to safely uninstall the product and monitor installed components. The setup is structured as follows: • Server
• Simatic connection • Full Services • License Management • Simatic Logon Service • Simatic Logon Admin • Bpm Server • Cib Compact • Cib Distributed-KB • Cib Distributed-Exe • Dis Server • Mm Server • Pdefm Server • Pom Server • Popr Server • Pm Server • Cab Server • Prm Server
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 has been tested with the following software: • Windows 2000 (Professional and Server) with Service Pack 4 or Windows XP with
Service Pack 2 or Windows 2003 • Internet Explorer 6.0 with Service Pack 1 • MDAC 2.8 • SqlServer 2000 (Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition (1)) with Service Pack 3 • MS-XML 4.0 SP2 • SQLXML 3.0 SP2 • Java Runtime 1.4.1_01 • Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 SDK • Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0 • Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003 • Microsoft Word 97 or later 1 Also Personal Edition is supported but it includes a concurrent workload governor that limits its scalability;
performance degrades when more than five Transact-SQL batches are executed concurrently. Therefore, as SIMATIC® IT components often use more than five batches, we suggest using Personal edition only for test/demo projects or engineering stations for which system performance is not important. For standard server stations, we suggest using the Standard Edition in order to obtain best performance. Standard edition can only be installed on server operating systems, namely Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server or Windows Server 2003 (Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter editions).
Siemens will provide customer support only if the product is installed according to this configuration; otherwise, SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 will not be covered by legal warranty. The following table represents the specific software requirements for each Production Suite Component
Required Software
Components
Word 97 or Later
MS XML 4.0 SP2
SQLXML 3.0 SP2
SQL Server
Java Runtime 1.4.1_01
MS .NET Framewor
k 1.1 SDK
Microsoft IIS 5.0
Microsoft Visual Studio
.Net 2003
PM X MM, POM, PDefM, BPM, PRM, POPR, DIS
X X X
BSM X CAB X X X X X
It is important to highlight that it is not possible to use mixed versions of SIMATIC® Production Suite components within the same application: e.g. it is not possible to integrate Material Manager 5.0 with Production Modeler 4.4.
Operating-system localization
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 has been tested with the English version of the supported operating system and with the following localized versions: • Windows XP and Windows 2003 in German • Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 in English with the Chinese
multilanguage add-on.
Use of SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 with other Siemens products
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 has not been tested for integration with PCS7: therefore, Siemens will not provide support for this particular configuration. The product components affected are:
- SIMATIC® IT PCS7 Tag Browser included in Services 5.0 - SIMATIC® IT COM Interface for SIMATIC® BATCH 2.0
Although these components are present on setup media, Siemens will not provide support for them.
The following table contains the list of Microsoft Security Hotfixes that have been used in SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 System Tests. Siemens will provide customer support only if the product is installed according to this configuration; if additional security patches are installed, SIMATIC® IT Production Suite will no longer be covered by legal warranty. In any case, Siemens will provide support for all those problems not related to the new Microsoft patches installed. Windows 2000 PRO Date Microsoft Knowledge Base Microsoft Bulletin 12-gen-05 Q890175 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890175 MS05001 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-001.mspx12-gen-05 Q871250 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=871250 MS05003 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-003.mspx14-apr-04 Q835732 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=835732 MS04011 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-011.mspx14-apr-04 Q828741 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=828741 MS04012 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-012.mspx14-apr-04 Q837001 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=837001 MS04014 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-014.mspx09-feb-05 Q885250 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=885250 MS05011 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-011.mspx10-mag-04 Q841382 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841382 --- 09-feb-05 Q891781 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=891781 MS05013 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-013.mspx09-giu-04 Q839643 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=839643 MS04016 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-016.mspx14-lug-04 Q841873 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841873 MS04022 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-022.mspx14-lug-04 Q840315 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=840315 MS04023 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-023.mspx09-feb-05 Q888113 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=888113 MS05015 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-015.mspx14-lug-04 Q842526 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=842526 MS04019 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-019.mspx00-gen-00 --- SP4 15-lug-04 Q841872 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841872 MS04020 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-020.mspx10-lug-03 Q823559 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823559 MS03023 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-023.mspx14-lug-04 Q839645 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=839645 MS04024 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-024.mspx09-feb-05 Q873333 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=873333 MS05012 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-012.mspx13-apr-05 Q893066 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=893066 MS05019 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-019.mspx13-ott-04 Q840987 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=840987 MS04032 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-032.mspx13-apr-05 Q890923 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890923 MS05020 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-020.mspx28-ago-03 Q819696 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=819696 MS03030 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-030.mspx13-apr-05 Q893086 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=893086 MS05016 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-016.mspx13-ott-04 Q841356 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841356 MS04037 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-037.mspx09-set-03 Q824105 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=824105 MS03034 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-034.mspx14-ott-04 Q824151 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=824151 MS04030 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-030.mspx14-ott-04 Q841533 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841533 MS04031 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-031.mspx13-apr-05 Q890859 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890859 MS05018 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-018.mspx17-ott-03 Q825119 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=825119 MS03044 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-044.mspx14-apr-05 Q892944 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=892944 MS05017 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-017.mspx31-ott-03 Q826232 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=826232 MS03042 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-042.mspx17-ott-03 Q823182 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823182 MS03041 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-041.mspx31-ott-03 Q828035 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=828035 MS03043 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-043.mspx11-mag-05 Q894320 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=894320 MS05024 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-024.mspx12-nov-03 Q828749 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=828749 MS03049 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS03-049.mspx15-dic-04 Q885836 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=885836 MS04041 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-041.mspx15-dic-04 Q873339 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=873339 MS04043 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-043.mspx15-dic-04 Q885835 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=885835 MS04044 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-044.mspx21-nov-03 Q329115 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329115 MS02050 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS02-050.mspx Windows 2000 SP4 Date Microsoft Knowledge Base Microsoft Bulletin 12-gen-05 Q890175 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890175 MS05001 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-001.mspx
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 guarantees interaction with .NET applications only via the .NET components provided by SIMATIC IT CAB (refer to the CAB documentation for additional details) or the public COM interfaces exposed by SIMATIC IT Components. Even if .NET applications and SIMATIC IT can interact using the interoperability layer provided by the .NET Framework itself (this layer is commonly called “COM Interop”, and guarantees communication between .NET and COM-based applications) the safe use of any other COM interfaces or public APIs is not guaranteed. Please refer to Microsoft knowledge base (available at the Microsoft WEB site http://support.microsoft.com) for a list of currently-known problems and suggestions regarding the use of the COM interop layer.
Interaction with 3rd-party tools
Using 3rd-party tools can interfer with the correct behavior of Production Suite. Particular care should be taken when using:
Remote Control
Typically, these tools make it possible to view and fully-interact with a specific computer from any other computer or mobile device anywhere on the Internet. Some of the most commonly-used tools are: • “NetMeeting” (distributed by Microsoft) • “On Command Remote” (distributed by Symantec) • “VNC” - Virtual Network Computing (distributed by RealVNC) • “pcAnywhere” (distributed by Symantec) Using these tools could slow down overall system performance.
“VNC” and “pcAnywhere” software is currently NOT supported. Please refer to the Technical Support Service ([email protected]) for any questions regarding this issue
Disk Backup and Disaster Recovery utilities
These tools provide data backup and recovery functionalities. Some of the most commonly-used tools are: • “Backup Exec”, “NetBackup” (distributed by Veritas) • “OpenView Storage Data Protector” (distributed by HP) Using these tools could slow down overall system performance: therefore, it is recommended that they be used during low activity periods of the system.
Time synchronization tools
These tools are used to synchronize the local clock of the PC with an external source (e.g. via a GPS) Notes:
• If not properly configured, the use of these tools could slow down overall system performance, due to the high percentage of CPU time they may require.
• It is recommended that these tools be properly tuned, monitoring the use of system resources.
Antivirus
These tools are used to protect the system from virus infections. Some of the most commonly-used tools are: • “Norton Antivirus” (distributed by Symantec) • “Office Scan, Server Protection” (distributed by Trend Micro) SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 has been tested with the “Trend Micro“ antivirus software in the following configuration: • On client machine: Office Scan version 5.5 • On server machine: Server Protection 5.56 Siemens will provide customer support only if the product is installed according to this configuration; if a different antivirus software is used, SIMATIC® IT Production Suite will no longer by covered by legal warranty. Notes:
• Scanning must be configured to run on a periodic basis and must be disabled on all product and project directories of the system.
• It is highly recommended not to configure antiviruses to scan SQL Server files (.mdf and .ldf).
• This activity could affect system performance and behaviour considerably.
Note on SIMATIC® IT Report Manager:
SIMATIC® IT Report Manager V6.1 must be used together with SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1. SIMATIC® IT Report Manager is the SIMATIC® IT component for reporting on the SIMATIC® IT product portfolio, including: • SIMATIC® IT Production Suite • SIMATIC® IT Historian • SIMATIC® IT Unilab • SIMATIC® IT Interspec SIMATIC® IT Report Manager provides out-of-the box 5 universes and a set of reports to speed up project implementation. Refer to the SIMATIC® IT Report Manager documentation for additional info. Note: SIMATIC® IT Report Manager embeds a BusinessObjects license restricted for reporting on SIMATIC® IT. For more details about license coverage of project customizations, please refer to SIMATIC® IT Report Manager documentation.
Note on MS SQLServer Installation
The following MS SQLServer 2000 editions are available: • Standard Edition • Personal Edition The software requirements for MS SQLServer are available at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/sysreqs/2000/default.asp The “MS SQLServer 2000 for SIMATIC® IT” installation CD is intended only for use with Siemens SIMATIC® IT products. If other uses are foreseen, MS SQLServer 2000 must be installed from the official Microsoft CD. Only the default instance is installed and no other instances can be added. Installation of MS SQLServer 2000 from MES Components SQL Server Setup CD-ROM will also be successful if a previous instance of SQL Server for WinCC is configured on the system. In this case, the user must not use WinCC MS SQLServer instance for Components or for PPA, but he/she must use the default instance just installed.
The system administrator login ‘sa’ is installed without a password: it is strongly recommended that a password be entered for ‘sa’, following installation. MS SQLServer must be configured to use mixed-mode authentication: the ‘Windows authentication only’ option is not supported. The service SQLSERVERAGENT is required by some components. Please verify that it is enabled.
Note on Components database management
Database creation or update during installation
During product installation, you have the opportunity to either create a new empty database or update a set of existing ones (for details, see the “SIMATIC® IT Components Installation Manual”). You can also select the login to use for the connection to the database. Note: the login must be configured in English and must be a standard login, not a Windows user. We strongly recommend that you backup your existing production databases before updating them. The suggested procedure for doing this is the Detach/Attach mechanism provided by SqlServer
Database management
A component named “SIMATIC IT Database Utility” is available from the installation process and can be used to create empty database structures for SIMATIC® IT Components or update the existing ones. It requires that Microsoft Data Access Components 2.8 be already installed locally and MS SQLServer 2000 SP3 be already installed on the same machine or on a remote workstation. You need to logon to SqlServer as a database administrator and select either the “create” or the “update” button. In the case of creation, you are prompted to enter the name for the new database (it must not already exist) and the login for the connection. You can indicate an existing login (it must be in English and be a standard login, not a Windows user) or accept the default one: SITMesUsr. In the case of updating, you are prompted to choose the database to upgrade. If performing an upgrade of the database, please consider that this operation may take a certain amount of time, and that it must be executed offline. Due to a new database structure and Unicode support, you must anticipate a database that is double the previous size.
Note: The database name must not contain any of the characters not supported by the CREATE DATABASE statement (see the Transact-SQL Reference). For instance, the character ‘.’ is not supported (i.e. ‘SITMesDb6.1’ is not allowed).
Login Password change
The login and its password (encrypted) are stored as configuration parameters of the product component (MM, POM, PDefM, BPM, PRM and POPR). If you want to change the login and/or password in SQL Server, you need to have the related items updated. To do so, you can use the menu option Component Component Database Configuration provided in SIMATIC® IT Management Console.
When Restoring a Backup Database
When restoring a database backup made on a different SQL Server, the database owner must be changed by executing the following system stored procedure (changing the login name according the correct settings): EXEC sp_changedbowner @loginame=’SITMesUsr’, @map=true
Single Database vs. Separate Databases
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 support a single unique database containing the data of all Components (BPM, MM, PDEFM, POM and POPR): two separate databases are no longer supported. When upgrading a previous installation with two separate databases, the DB upgrade tool will start importing data from the “Core” database and then offer the possibility of importing material information from the “Production” database. Refer to the installation manual for additional details about the database upgrade tool.
Should SQL SERVER Database Reside on a Separate Machine?
From a purely functional standpoint, it is possible to have SqlServer Database Server running on the same machine as SIMATIC® IT Production Suite. However, on the basis of our experience on typical MES applications, we strongly recommend not doing so, i.e. keep the Database Server on a separate machine. If single machine installation is an important requirement from the customer, it is recommended that this choice be evaluated by way of consultancy services provided by Siemens.
Very important Warnings regarding SQLServer Configuration
The “Priority Boost” option must be left at its default value (zero). Although this option may apparently seem to increase SqlServer performance, changing this value can cause more harm than benefit, as other processes pay the cost. In the case of SqlServer running on the same machine as the rest of SIMATIC® IT Production Suite, it is very likely that Production Modeler and Components do suffer the consequences of this setting.
This setting may also cause connection errors. For more information, please refer to related articles at Microsoft Support website The replication configurations of SqlServer are not supported in this version. SQL Server must be configured to use a fixed amount of memory.
Filegroup configuration
The product database uses the filegroup feature of SQL Server to distribute data over several files. The files used by the database are:
- Master Data file - Transaction log File - Engineering Data file - Engineering Indexes file - Runtime Data file - Runtime Indexes file - Historical Data file - Historical Indexes file
During database creation, you can specify a different path for each file. For optimal performance, it is suggested to store these files on different physical disks (or RAID channels). As a rule of thumb, the following is suggested:
1) Put the transaction log file on a dedicated device. 2) Separate Indexes file from Data files 3) Separate Runtime, Historical and Engineering files.
It is important to remember that the database files should not reside on the operating-system disk or on the same disk where the paging file is.
Hardware Requirements
Depending on the user’s requirements, several workstation and server configurations are available. However, as a rule, the following types of server can be identified: Server DescriptionProduction Modeler Production Modeler server runs on this server Components Components servers run on this server SQL Server SQL Server runs on this server Web Server MS-IIS and CAB server run on this server CAB Engineering CAB Engineering station
It is possible to access the online documentation (manuals and helps) for the entire SIMATIC® IT Production Suite from the shortcut Start > SIMATIC® IT Documentation. In addition, all online helps can be accessed from the Help menu of the various user interfaces. Installation and Upgrade manuals can also be found in the \Documentation folder of the Production Suite setup CD-ROM. It is recommended that you read these manuals before installing the product.
Documentation languages
Online Helps for Client and Engineering environments are available in both English and German. The following documentation is only available in English. • SIMATIC IT Installation Upgrade – Technical Notes • Production Suite Installation Manual • Production Suite Functional Overview (two documents) • Production Suite Compatibility documents • Production Suite Components COM Interface Online Helps • Production Suite FAQs Online Help
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite system documentation
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 comes provided with: • A Functional Overview (English) • A FAQs Online Help (English) • A Guide to typical installation use cases (Installation Manual) (English)
Components Technical Overview manual (English)
The description of methods / events exposed by the Components (MM, POM, BPM, POPR) has been extracted from the manual (which is no longer provided) and is now available as separate online helps, which can be called up: • From Start SIMATIC® IT Documentation Production Suite • From within an Editor (VB / VC++) by clicking F1. • From the Help menu of SIMATIC IT Production Modeler Developer Client.
1. From Start > SIMATIC IT Documentation, when opening a documentation file, a dialog box that asks the user to either open or save files is displayed. To display documentation, click Open.
2. The Getting Started online help is not provided with SIMATIC IT Production Suite V6.1. It will be available in SP1.
3. The Material Manager Runtime Client OCX Online Help is available only in English.
4. The Personnel Manager Online Help (German version) is not correctly formatted. 5. In the SIMATIC IT COM Interface for SIMATIC BATCH Online Help, links to
the SIMATIC BATCH API Online Help work correctly only if the default installation path has been used to install SIMATIC IT Production Suite.
UNICODE support has been extended to almost any data in the system to permit the use of any localized character set.
DTC support
Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator support has been added to permit the definition of distributed transaction among many SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 Components.
GSI interfaces
The integration of SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 Components with Production Modeler has been improved thanks to the use of a dedicated communication channel. Components expose a new dedicated “GSI” interface that can be used from within PM rules.
UTC support
SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 support UTC for timing information. This allows the product to be used independently of the local timezone settings.
UOM Server
Unit Of Measure management is now centralized for all SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 Components.
Configuration
The configuration of database connection parameters for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 Components is no longer required in .INI files. All connection parameters are managed by the “Component Database Configurator” tool and are stored in the system registry.
The PCS7 Tag Browser is not officially supported by this product version. Although the component is installed, Siemens will not provide any support until the next product version.
User Change on Citrix
Due to a particular Hotkey management on Citrix Client, you must follow the instructions given below in order to change the user: • Publish the RACHK.EXE application (in %ICUBEPATH%\BIN) to client • Launch this application on client side • When a user change is necessary, set the focus on another application running in
CITRIX mode and then click Shift+Esc: at this point, you can enter the login and password of the new user.
User Change on Terminal Server client (Remote Desktop Connection)
The first time you connect to the machine with TS support, customize Desktop as described below: Create a shortcut of RACHK.EXE process on desktop. When you connect on, creating a session, run the program by clicking on shortcut. When it is necessary to change the user, click Shift+Esc and enter the new user name and the relative password.
IPC Communication port
By default, IPC Services uses port 3002 for TCP transmission. If you are accessing the network through a firewall, your firewall administrator will need to authorize this port or change, by means of the IPC Configuration wizard, the Ris port number in accordance with port opened on the firewall. If you change the default, please verify that all workstations in the SIMATIC® It configuration have the same port number configured.
MSM Display Client on Http environmental
If you force a particular client to use the HTTP or HTTPS protocol for communication, by using contexts (see CAB Protocol Configurator documentation, available from the Help > Contents & Index menu of SIMATIC IT Management Console), Messaging Manager Display Client might display the messages it receives more slowly.
In order to increase the MSM client-side message download rate in this environment, you must set the configuration as follows: By Regedit, create the following entry in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIEMENS-ORSI Automation S.p.A.\Simatic IT\Messanger\Parameters\ Set the value:
PollingRefresh=3000
Proxy Configuration
The communication channel via Http uses Microsoft® Windows® HTTP Services (WinHTTP) In order to use the Internet proxy, run the Microsoft utility proxycfg with parameter u:
proxycfg –u This utility creates the following entry in the register HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\WinHttpSettings
With parameter –u, IPC services with channel Http will use the Internet Explorer settings in order to access the eventual Internet proxy.
SIMATIC Logon
The authentication of users imported from Windows via SIMATIC Logon is granted only if it is executed within a domain. Otherwise, if SIMATIC Logon is installed, SIMATIC Logon must be disabled by selecting the appropriate checkbox on Import User Tool.
Compliance Services upgrade
When upgrading from a previous version, you must start the Compliance Services configurator (from ISM menu configuration ) in order to convert the default DataBase.
Internal tools
The DllDebug application and SitMon application are internal tools that monitor operations in applications and libraries and can be used only under the supervision of the Technical Support Service.
Standard User Manager
To use standard User Manager on Basic services, RAC.ENG must be copied and renamed “RAC.CHI”.
On Web installation it is necessary to manually register MsgBrwGrid.ocx and complSrvX.ocx: Launch a Command Prompt and type "regsrv32 %ICUBEPATH%\BIN\MsgBrwGrid.ocx" "regsrv32 %ICUBEPATH%\BIN\complSrvX.ocx". On Windows 2000 SP4 with Internet Explorer 6 SP1, it is also necessary to manually register CDT.dll: Launch a Command Prompt and type "regsrv32 %ICUBEPATH%\BIN\CDT.dll" then restart the PC.
Chinese language
As of this version, the capability to integrate the Chinese language has been added to SIMATIC® IT products. To enable this language, you must launch the application "add_chinese.exe".
Compliance service
As of this version, the plant must always be shared when using Compliance Services.
Installing the Software
Two installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT Services 5.0: • Full Services: provides all functionalities of SIMATIC® IT Services • Basic Services: provides limited client functionalities:
The “Stand Alone” working modality has been maintained solely for reasons of compatibility and is no longer supported. You must always define a network configuration, as well as a Foundation Server (on a configuration consisting in a unique station - it stands to reason that the foundation server corresponds to the unique existing machine) If you select the StandAlone mode, a warning dialog will appear.
What’s New
SIMATIC Logon
The User Manager Module is integrated with SIMATIC® Logon.
SIMATIC License Management
This version is completely integrated with Siemens Automation License Manager.
Known Technical Issues
Terminal Server support for Basic Client station
If you want to add Terminal Server/Citrix support to a Basic Services station, it is mandatory that the following steps be performed:
1. Close all SIMATIC® IT applications active on the client 2. From a command prompt, run the command "net stop simaticitipc" 3. Rename “rqmlib.dll” in the directory “%ICUBEPATH%\BIN” to “rqmlib.UFF” 4. Rename rqmlib_”TS.dll” in directory “%ICUBEPATH%\BIN” to “rqmlib.dll” 5. From cmd, set the command "net start simaticitipc"
The TS/Citrix support for applications supporting it is active. From a Services’ standpoint, support is guareanteed (IPC, Access Control). It is mandatory that you verify whether the applications support this working procedure or not. The following applications completely support the TS/Citrix mode:
• Messaging Manager Display Client • Compliance Services Common Viewer • Historian Data Display (Historian)
Cab Protocol Configurator
By clicking the Help Button, it is not possible to display the relative file. Refer to the Services online help. In this version, no check regarding the correctness of syntax for entries made in the protocol configuration fields is performed. In particular, in field “WEB SEVER IP”, you must enter the server IP address containing SITISAPI EXTENSION.
Lock Object Server
The Lock Object Server is not integrated in Management Console. To use this server, you must load the file LockObject.adn found in%ICUBECNF% via MMC > System Configuration as a Third-Party application.
Compliance Service
The format of the Audit Trail Databases has changed: the old Databases may no longer be used. As for safe storage management, the reference between the ER and the AT is performed in a more effective manner, using the “ObjectID” field of the AT managed with specific functions. If no safe storage is not required, this field can be managed by the application. In this case, the ‘#’ character is not allowed in the “ObjectID” field. In the AT Repository, only the Audit & Trail records with GMPRelevant=1 are valid.
Messaging Manager
Groups of radio buttons may may present problems if the buttons are not aligned vertically or horizontally. In Template Editor, the template or area are not refreshed correctly when scrollin.
PCS7 Tag Browser
In the CCINSInfoBrowser ocx, if you click the "Symbolic Name", "Status" or "Unit" column headers, listed tags are sorted by tag name.
In order to use the CAB Graphic Components, they must be added to the VS .NET Toolbox. To do this, perform the following steps: 1. Open Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2. Launch the “Reload Toolbar” command from the VS.NET “CAB” menu If the operation is completed successfully,you should see that the VS .NET Toolbox now has some extra Tabs filled with Components from the CAB Library.
CAB Runtime Client Security Configuration
SIMATIC® IT Client Application Builder is designed to be compliant with the default security level of Internet Explorer. To set the Default Security Level on Internet Explorer: 1. Open Control Panel 2. Double-click Internet Options 3. Select the Security Tab 4. Select the Web Zone Internet 5. Click the “Default Level” Button 6. Repeat step 5, selecting the Web Zone Local Intranet and Trusted Site. 7. Click Apply and OK Add the CAB Application web server to the Trusted Site in Internet Explorer Configuration. To accomplish this task, perform the following steps: 1. Open Control Panel 2. Double-click Internet Options 3. Select the Security Tab 4. Select Trusted Site 5. Click the “Sites...” button 6. Add the site name where your CAB Application resides. (e.g. http://myCABSite) 7. Click OK.
The “DiscoveryAccess” process must grant access and launch permissions to the APSNET user (for IIS5.1) or NETWORK_SERVICES user (for IIS6.0) using Microsoft dcomcnfg or oleview utilities. SIMATIC® IT Client Application Builder MM Data Provider requires some extra security configuration when MM Server is installed and running in CAB WebServer machine. The “MM.HutServer” and “MMSrv.MMConnector”, “MM” processes must grant access and launch permissions to the APSNET user (for IIS5.1) or NETWORK_SERVICES user (for IIS6.0) using Microsoft dcomcnfg or oleview utilities.
Upgrading Smart Query Builder queries
After upgrading to SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1, all queries created with Smart Query Builder must be refreshed in order to function correctly. All CAB pages referencing them must be updated as required.
Installing the Software
Three installation option exist for SIMATIC® IT CAB 1.1:
- CAB Server - CAB Engineering - CAB Web Server
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
Obsolete features
Component DataProviders
DataProviders for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1 components are no longer supported. They are provided only to guarantee compatibility with previous version of the product. Access to component data is foreseen by means of the Smart Query Builder.
CAB 1.0 HotFix1 Release Notes described a workaround for “Regional settings mismatch” problems, in CAB 1.1, a simplified “workaround” has been introduced.
SYMPTOMS
If your server machine has regional settings that do not match with the culture used by ASP.NET during runtime, you may encounter errors in loading date/time or other culture-dependant data types (e.g. “System.FormatException: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime”).
WORKAROUND
Both CAB 1.1 MM and POM DataProviders “server cultures” can now be configured directly in web.config file of a CAB WebApplication. An example: <appSettings> <add key="mmServerCulture" value="it-CH" /> <add key="pomServerCulture" value="it-CH" /> </appSettings>
Known Technical Issues
CAB Web Server and CAB Server machine name problems
Domains that use cookies must use only alphanumeric characters ("-" or ".") in the domain name and the server name. Refer to “PRB: Session Variables Do Not Persist Between Requests After You Install Internet Explorer Security Patch MS01-055” article at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316112 for more details.
CAB Script Editor and keyboard shortcuts
While writing code using CAB Script Editor, some keyboard shortcuts (F5, CTRL+key, etc…) are caught by CAB. To solve this problem, remove focus from the CAB Script Editor.
How to make a Session survive its natural timeout without user interaction
SYMPTOMS
When you have a web page containing “self-updating” graphical objects and users are supposed to open this page not refreshing it for a long period of time, you can experience “session expiration”.
The user may be requested to re-log into the application or may even lose the connection with the server side engine.
CAUSE
On the web server, each “user session” (i.e. a sequence of the user’s browsing actions) is associated with a SessionState object that has a default timeout period of 20 minutes (see web.config file tag sessionState attribute timeout).
WORKAROUND
To overcome this problem, you must perform periodical activity with the web server simply to retrigger the Session timeout. One way to do this is as follows:.
1) Add a new empty webform to your application (e.g. Pong.aspx).
2) On the “Page_Load” event handler of the inserted page, add the following line. C#: Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache); VB.NET: Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache)
Environment.NewLine & _ " req.onreadystatechange = receive;" & Environment.NewLine & _ " req.Open(""GET"", ""Pong.aspx"", true);" & Environment.NewLine & _ " req.send();" & Environment.NewLine & _ "}" & Environment.NewLine & _ "function receive() {" & Environment.NewLine & _ " if (req.readyState == 4) {" & Environment.NewLine & _ " if (req.status == 200) {" & Environment.NewLine & _ " window.status = ""Ok on: "" + new Date();" & Environment.NewLine & _ " }" & Environment.NewLine & _ " }" & Environment.NewLine & _ "}" & Environment.NewLine & _ "timerId = window.setInterval(""ping();"", pingTime);" & Environment.NewLine & _ "</script>" This is just a sample. In particular, the body of the function receive() is just a suggestion.
4) On Global.asax, add these event handlers. C#: private void Global_PreRequestHandlerExecute(object sender, EventArgs e) { System.Web.UI.Page p = Context.Handler as System.Web.UI.Page; if (p != null) { // Check here what page include or exclude. E.g. : if (Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath != "/StayAlive/Pong.aspx") { p.PreRender += new EventHandler(InjectScript); } } } private void InjectScript(object sender, EventArgs e) { System.Web.UI.Page p = sender as System.Web.UI.Page; if (p != null) { if (!p.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered("ALIVE")) { p.RegisterClientScriptBlock("ALIVE", _stayAlive); } } } VB.NET: Private Sub Global_PreRequestHandlerExecute(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.PreRequestHandlerExecute If TypeOf Context.Handler Is System.Web.UI.Page Then Dim p As System.Web.UI.Page = CType(Context.Handler, System.Web.UI.Page) AddHandler p.PreRender, New EventHandler(AddressOf
Me.InjectScript) End If End Sub Private Sub InjectScript(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) If TypeOf sender Is System.Web.UI.Page Then Dim p As System.Web.UI.Page = CType(sender, System.Web.UI.Page) If Not p.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered("ALIVE") Then p.RegisterClientScriptBlock("ALIVE", Me._stayAlive) End If End If End Sub 5) Adjust request period changing the value of the script variable pingTime (in
milliseconds). 6) Adjust the name of the page to call (in our example, “Pong.aspx”).
When testing a page, you should be able to find out the injected script by clicking “View Source” on Internet Explorer. Another check you can perform is to start your application in debug mode and set a breakpoint on the “Page_Load” event handler of the page “Pong.aspx”: you should see a periodical invocation.
Known Technical Issues (CAB)
After installation of a ZAC client, the MsgBrwGrid.ocx must be manually registered using system utility REGSVR32.EXE.
Setting the Plant in SIMATIC IT Production Modeler as “CURRENT”
In SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler, the user must set the plant as CURRENT if he/she needs to select it from SIMATIC® IT Production Order Manager (POM) or import it to Historian Plant Performance Analyzer .
How to change the Pcell link to another BATCH UNIT
In SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler, the sub UNITs of a PCell linked to a SIMATIC® BATCH PCell (through the SIMATIC® IT COM Interface for SIMATIC® BATCH) can also be linked with the UNITs in SIMATIC® BATCH. This link is performed through the attribute “SB-UNIT-NAME”. To modify the link to another SIMATIC® BATCH UNIT, it is strongly recommended that you perform these steps: 1. Clean the attribute by removing the link 2. Save the Production Modeler Plant also in Business Process Modeler Database 3. Import the Plant Model in Plant Performance Analyzer 4. Define the new value for the SB-UNIT-NAME attribute and perform 2) and 3) again
Deleting a Plant
When deleting a Plant from BPM, a check is performed to verify that data referenced by other components are not deleted. This may lead to a persistence of some data in the BPM database, even if the deletion is executed correctly.
Production Modeler server indication
The SetEquipProperty (BPMServer) and ChangeEquipmentProperty (BPMBrowser) methods require that the Production Modeler server that is running be indicated correctly. This can be configured via the Options option in the BPM Server form.
Installing the Software
Three installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT BPM 5.0: - BPM Server - BPM Configurator - BPM Display
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
What’s New
Versioning
BPM can archive more versions of the same plant or library in the SQL Server database.
Unicode support
All text fields support UNICODE character sets.
Distributed transaction
Using the new COM (BPM Browser) interface, it possible to supply all methods with a transaction cookie that allows BPM server to participate in a distributed transaction, coordinated by Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
BPM-EQUIP-TREE-OCX
This new OCX show the hierarchy of each plant archived in the database and the list of equipment and objects of each library. You can apply filters to choose the objects retrieved from the database.
Fixed Technical Issues
Configuration
The configuration of the database connection parameters is no longer required in .INI file. All connection parameters are managed by the “Component Database Configurator” tool and are stored in the system registry.
If the material configuration of POs, Rules, or Steps refers to Unit of Measures that are not present in the table MESUoMs, the download-objects on these elements may fail with the following error: Error >> INSERT statement conflicted with COLUMN FOREIGN KEY constraint 'FK_---_MESUoMs'. The conflict occurred in database ---, table 'MESUoMs', column 'UomID'.
Incremental Import in PPA
For a plant model imported into PPA, BPM stores all changes to permit PPA alignment. Changes must be stored in a strictly chronological order. In some circumstances, it could happen that BPM be unable to guarantee the chronological order of archived changes. In such cases, the incremental import from PPA may experience some problems.
Default name for Process Segment (or Production Operation) Rules of Rules
BPM supports only the default name of the Process Segment Rules of Rules (or Production Operation Rules of Rules): “INITIALIZE”, “EXECUTION”, “END”. If you rename them, BPM cannot work properly.
Hierarchy of the Process Segment (or Production Operation) Rules of Rules
BPM builds the hierarchy of the Process Segment Rules of Rules (or Production Operation Rules of Rules) through the configuration of the Start-Segment (or Start-Product) steps in SIMATIC®
IT Production Modeler. If you want to create the hierarchy among PSs (or POs),
you should take care to browse only the instances of the production operations.
Download of PS/Po hierarchies
If you do not succeed in obtaining a hierarchy among PSs/POs in SIMATIC® IT Production Order Manager, download the root PS/PO (download-objects starting from the root PS/PO) again. It depends on the order of the child POs downloaded in the database.
Association Between PO and Final Material
A PO can have only a single Final Material (however, any number of input/output materials can be specified as associated to the PO)
As of version 6.1 of Production Suite, all SIMATIC IT Components, and not only PM, manage object versioning. In addition, version specification has been made uniform and consistent to common understanding, and it now consists in only two numbers, to indicate major and minor changes (for details, see paragraph Version number “x.y” in this document) For what regards plant and libraries, SIMATIC IT components may require that their version be set to the “current” version to fully manage items contained therein (e.g.: to dispatch an order by POM). As previous PM releases adopted a different numbering of versions and did not implement the “current” concept, any library or plant developed using Production Suite 5.1 or previous must be upgraded. Upgrading existing plants and libraries adapts their representation in Database, which is done automatically, but requires that the user decide the new version number (if necessary), as well as establish which version must be considered as “current”. The last two operations are requested by PM the first time it loads a library or plant saved with older versions of PM. Until these operations are performed, the library or plant may not be viewed correctly by SIMATIC IT Components. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you load old libraries or plants in PM before using or referencing them in other components.
KPIs assigned to objects shared with SIMATIC® BATCH
In PM, you can define plant model objects that are defined also in SIMATIC® BATCH, and assign them KPIs. Examples of such objects are Pcells (included in SIMATIC-BATCH-LIBRARY) and all units defined inside a Pcell. In Version 4.3SP2 of PM, a new attribute had been added to units: sb-unit-name. This attribute identifies the name of units defined in SIMATIC® BATCH inside a Pcell. The Pcell object itself has an attribute (pcell-name) that identifies the name of the Pcell in SIMATIC® BATCH. To avoid misunderstandings, a stringent control has been added in PM on the value of those attributes compared with the name of the objects in PM. For Pcell objects: If the Pcell-name attribute is blank, then the name of the Pcell in PM can be set as you prefer . If the Pcell-name attribute contains the name of a Pcell in SIMATIC® BATCH, then the name of the Pcell in PM must be equal to the Pcell-Name For units inserted inside a Pcell:
• If the sb-unit-name attribute is blank, then the name of the unit in PM can be set as you prefer.
• If the sb-unit-name attribute contains the name of a unit in SIMATIC® BATCH, then the name of the unit in PM must be equal to the SB-Unit-Name
Please note that names of objects defined in SIMATIC® BATCH may contain special characters (e.g.: @, blanks,..) that cannot be used in PM objects names. For this reason, it is best not to define names including special characters for units and Pcells in SIMATIC® BATCH that will be seen also by PM.
Plant download on BPM
When the user decides to download an entire plant on BPM, he/she can choose to clean the existing saved plant on BPM before downloading it. Although this will ensure having exactly the same structure in both data storages, it is strongly recommended not to clean the BPM plant, for the following reasons: • All historical data saved on plant (log of attribute changes) will be lost • The plant model imported by PPA will not be anymore valid, and a totally new import
must be done, loosing the previous configuration
Authorizing PM
SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler is sold at different prices on the basis of how many units are to be defined by the user in his/her application. This policy requires that, in order to run PM, you must insert additional codes regarding the number of units allowed, via SIMATIC® IT Services PM licenses are based on the total number of units that can be created by the user. Three different license types are provided: • PM-100: 100 Units • PM-400: 400 Units • PM-800: 800 Units To count the total number of units, count the number of plant objects that do not contain other objects. In this manner, the following objects are counted for the sake of authorization: • Any site, area, unit, or cell not containing anything counts as one unit • A site, area, cell, or unit containing other objects is not counted • Library objects are not counted Note: In versions prior to Production Suite 5.1, the following license types were provided: • PM-25: 25 Units • PM-100: 100 Units • PM-Unl: Unlimited Units
License insertion
This version is completely integrated with Siemens Automation License Manager. For this reason the hardware key is no longer necessary.
For further details about the License installation and management, please refer to Automation Licence Manager Help. License authorization will be checked by PM using its launcher. This means that the launcher will not run if SIMATIC® IT Services is not installed and running on the computer. The user must insert codes using standard SIMATIC® IT Services mechanisms and interfaces.
Process segment notes
In PM 5.0 a new concept has been added: process segment. For a complete description of this new object, please refer to dedicated paragraph in chapter “What’s New”: Definition of Process Segments in PM and PDefM. Some limitations are set for process segments (routing segments) calling other process segments (child segment) that, in turn, call another process segment. This recursive nesting of process segments is allowed, but not in loop. In other terms, it is not possible to call in a loop inside a routing segment other routing segments. Due to the great flexibility of engineering operation in PM, it is quite impossible to check this at product level, so the PM engineer must take care of not inserting start segments calling other routing segments in a loop, or not inserting start segments in a process segment that is called by another process segment inside a loop. Such errors will be detected in run time, and the resulting start segments will exit from the “false red path”.
Transactional Rules notes
In PM 5.0 a support for distributed transaction is available (for details, please see dedicated paragraph in chapter “What’s New”:Distributed Transactions Support) Distributed transactions must be used carefully in an application, and only for very quick operations, because tables in DB affected by such transactions are locked by SQL server. For that reason, it is not recommended to call from those rules methods of components requiring long time to be completed, or requiring user intervention to be completed. For the same reason, not all blocks available in “normal” rules are available in transaction rules too. For example, it is not possible to insert a “send message” object inside such rules. In addition, even a user application can take advantage of distributed transaction support, without taking care of generating a transaction id, which is automatically generated and managed by PM that passes it to SIMATIC IT components and to any user component that can accept it. The inverse operation, i.e.: the transaction id generated by a user application and passed from that to SIMATIC IT components is completely under user responsibility and it is strongly not recommended, because can cause errors that affect all components of the suite.
Update of old wording
A number of system objects have been renamed, because the old label was not aligned with the new names of Components in Production Suite. This renaming has no effect on the implementation of such objects, but it only applies to their description in palettes or configuration dialogs.
The list of renamed objects is shown in the following table: Old Name New Name Mesad-Local-Variable PM-Local-Variable Mesad-Event Root Mesad-Goal Goal Mesad-Event-Deduction PM-Event-Deduction Mesad-Dummy-Task Dummy-Task Mesad-Dummy-Event-Task Dummy-Event-Task Mesad-cube-track-dcom-task cube-track-dcom-task Mesad-generic-cube-track-event generic-cube-track-event Mesad-generic-cube-track-dcom-task generic-cube-track-dcom-task Mesad-generic-pde-event generic-pde-event Mesad-generic-com-event generic-com-event Mesad-generic-pde-com-task generic-pde-com-task Mesad-generic-com-task generic-com-task Mesad-generic-simatic-com-task generic-simatic-com-task Mesad-generic-simatic-event generic-simatic-event Mesad-com-task com-task Mesad-pde-task pde-task Mesad-simatic-task simatic-task Mesad-void-block void-block
Date Management in PM COM Interface
It is now possible to manipulate arguments of type DATE in methods of components accessed by PM COM Interface. Note that arguments of type DATE are imported by PM as FLOAT by default. In order to access them, it is necessary to manually change the type of argument from FLOAT to STRUCTURE in the method definition To manipulate values of type DATE in PM expressions and then to pass those values to PM COM Interface, it is possible to use the new functions quoted in paragraph New functions available.
Launching Developer Clients
In order to launch a PM Developer Client on a PC, the user must manually create a shortcut to executable TW.exe, configured as follows:
• Target: <PM Developer Client Installation path>\tw.exe <PM Server Host name> <PM Server port number> -ui classic
• Start in: <PM Developer Client Installation path> Usually, the port number to specify for connecting to PM Server is 1111; in case that port is occupied when PM starts, the next one free is automatically selected, starting from 1112. Example: Supposing the user has chosen to install PM Developer Client on disk d:, and that PM server runs on a remote PC with host name PMSRVPC, the shortcut must be configured as follows:
As the PM Developer client starts up, it creates standard output messages, which describe:
• The initial memory allocation. • Errors encountered while processing an authorization (OK) file. • Errors that occur while trying to make contact with PM Server.
During normal run, the PM client also displays standard output messages when it must attempt to allocate additional memory and when it detects an internal error. All those standard output messages are written to a uniquely named log file in the directory specified by your TEMP environment variable; if you want to select a file of your choice where those messages must be written, you can specify it with the -log command-line option, followed by the name of the file. Following the previous example, you can write:
Though it is still supported, the implicit Material Management in rules and PO rules is declared as a “deprecated” feature and it might be dismissed in next versions of Production Suite. To define materials inside PM the suggested possibilities are:
• Define Process segments and configure their materials requirements as resource specifications
• Specify materials requirements or data as input arguments of POs or rules To use materials inside PM rules use MM system method callers (or the new MM Gsi system method caller) explicitly accessing the desired functionalities.
Start segment configuration
A START-SEGMENT with the attribute Plant-Object set to none is not supported in the creation of the Process Segment hierarchy in PDEFM or during the Run Process Segment operation in POM.
Installing the Software
Four installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT PM 5.0 - PM Server - PM COM Interface - PM Developer Client - PM Display
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
Obsolete features
PM Display
PM Display is going not be supported anymore. That client is based upon technology not consistent with SIMATIC IT. All Client operations can be performed using PM Developer Client.
Debug Mode
Due to inconsistencies with the current caching modality of PM rules, it is not more permitted to select debug modality. Now, executed rules are anyway maintained, to allow caching mechanism to work. The user can anyway select the number of executed rules to keep as well as the rule-caching mode.
Old analysis elements
A number of analysis elements and task or event types available in PM actually refer to obsolete components or features. Those objects continued to be supported, but they are marked as “deprecated” from the current version, and they are set in dedicated palettes not available at the main level of PM rule editing palette (see paragraph New Palettes organization for details)
What’s New
Distributed Transactions Support
Starting from PM 5.0, a new type of rule has been added: Transaction Rule. This type of rule is intended to be used in conjunction with Distributed Transaction Service of MS. Each action performed on DB executed inside that rule can be inserted in a transaction, and can be roll-backed in case of errors.
Such rules activates DTC service when started, and obtain a “transaction cookie” that can be passed to SIMATIC IT Components to include all actions performed in that rule inside the same transaction. The use of the transaction cookie in SIMATIC IT components is allowed only via the new GSI interface (see paragraph “new components interface” for details). The execution of such rules corresponds to a transaction, that is automatically opened by PM and that will be closed at the rule execution end. That rule must be explicitly terminated by an end-of-rule block, to specify the transaction status. If the user wants to commit the transaction, the status of the end-of-rule must be set to “ok”; otherwise, it must be set to “not-ok”, in which case the transaction is canceled and a roll-back of changed data is automatically performed. When a transaction rule ends without an end-of-rule specified, the opened transaction will be automatically cancelled and a roll-back of data is executed on DB. Due to their nature, transactional rules are not recovered in case of PM crash; instead, the correspondent transactions are automatically closed and their data roll-backed. At subsequent PM re-start, those rules are automatically restarted from beginning (and new transactions are created). It is possible to use the generated cookie within end-user components accessing database. To do that, components’ methods must accept the cookie as input. Please note that transactions apply only on DB operations
New Components interface
Starting from this version, the interface between PM and SIMATIC IT components has been completely re-written. Now, the standard COM interface of components is not anymore used, in favor of a dedicated interface for any component. The advantage of this reside in a performance gain, since the time needed to pass values between different processes is dramatically reduced. The COM interface with such components is maintained for compatibility only, so that existing applications can continue to access SIMATIC IT Components without making any change. In conjunction to this, the interface of SIMATIC IT components has been revised in Production Suite version 6.1 (refer to documentation of those components for any detail). The new list of methods is accessible from PM using the new components interface, and it is not accessible via COM interface. To access components, a new type of system method callers has been developed (gsi-system-method-callers); the old system method callers are maintained for compatibility only. Through the new interface, besides performance gain, some improvements have been done, for example in visualization and check of status of the connection, which now includes also the connection of the component to SQL Server. In addition, the return codes of all components’ methods are now harmonized. The list of SIMATIC IT components that implements the new dedicated interface is the following:
• SIMATIC IT Production Operation Recorder (POPR) • SIMATIC IT Material Manager (MM) • SIMATIC IT Personnel Manager (PRM) • SIMATIC IT Data Integration Service (DIS)
Similarly to what is possible for Com-logical-units, the PM engineer can create its own class that maps to one of the above components using the new interface. This is useful to have more than one instance of the same component accessed by PM in parallel. To do that, the user must subclass the system class GSI-LOGICAL-UNIT, given in the new library GSI-INDUSTRY-LIBRARY. Currently, it is suggested to map in this way only POM and DIS components.
Version number “x.y”
Old versions of PM already support already supports version-number for libraries and plants. The number was displayed as x.y.z.q, in which x, y, z and q can be any type of text, e.g., a number, a letter or a string. Starting from PM version 5.0, the version configuration for Libraries and plants has been changed separating the major and minor version, as described below. The default version-number is now displayed as “x.y“, in which both x and y are numbers, and represent respectively the major and minor version change. This complies with the most common understanding and usage of version numbers of objects. When creating a new version, the user will need to enter if it will be a major version or a minor version. The new version-number is automatically generated, according to the following algorithm: In case of major change:
• New X = the maximum existent X + 1 • New Y = 0
In case of a minor change: • New X = current X • New Y = the maximum existent Y for the current major version + 1
Example: starting from a library of version 5.3, creating a new version will set version number as:
• In case of new major version: 6.0 • In case of new minor version: 5.4
All checks previously made by PM while loading/changing library version continue to be applied. The new version information is sent also to BPM to correctly store the plant/library structure in the right version. When user tries to load an existing library, which have a version number not consistent with the one here described, he/she is asked to insert new major/minor version indication, which can be consistent with the new version numbering, and a new version of the library is created. The old version number is referred as version description and visible via menu command Show->Show Version Details.
Starting from Production Suite 6.1, in addition to PM, even all other components will manage versioning. This extension has caused some modifications in PM versioning concepts, which are now the followings:
• Each Plant (and Library) has a version in the format X.Y (X and Y numeric)
• Each Plant (and Library) can assume a version-status chosen between “In Editing” and “In Production”
o a Plant “In Editing” can allow modifications and can be active.
o a Plant “In Production” is read-only and can be active.
PM notifies BPM about all the modules currently loaded.
When PM creates another version of a plant or library, BPM creates as well a new version of it (previously, the plant or library were simply overwritten in BPM).
BPM introduces in the database a flag “loaded” that indicates if a Plant or a Library is active in PM. This flag is updated at any load/unload operation made in PM, and guarantees that the related Plant (Library) is active in PM.
Besides the concept of “loaded”, a more general concept of “current” version is managed by PM and by SIMATIC IT Components. Any Component can refer, in addition to a specific version number of a plant, to the “current” version.
The only subject that can specify which version must be considered “current” is the PM user. To do that, he/she can select the menu Set-current from a plant. Since the “current” concept is useful mainly for SIMATIC IT Components, and in operations that involve plant objects rather than library classes, a version can be set as “current” for plants only.
New Palettes organization
Palettes of available objects have been completely re-organized, highlighting the most used objects. In addition, “Deprecated” containers have been defined, where the user can find old objects that are still supported (for compatibility only) but not suggested. Then complete set of elements that are still supported for compatibility only, and then are inserted in dedicated palettes can be herein: Deprecated objects in REPAC LEAF palette:
• External-Console-Container o Serial operator console o Parallel operator console
The option folders have been completely re-organized, in order to better categorize available options, and to identify those that are not anymore used (put in “Obsolete Parameters” folder). The complete list is shown in the following table
Folder Option Name Default Value Allowable values
Compatibility Parameters
Old COM Method Return Value Compatibility off on/off
Compatibility Parameters Old Name Management FALSE true/false
Time Parameters Expression Evaluation Timeout 60 any number
Time Parameters Network Disconnection Timeout 0 any number
Time Parameters Setting Evaluation Timeout 60 any number
Translation Parameters
Create Back-up Translation Files off on/off
Translation Parameters Default Translation Path translations\ any string
Translation Parameters Translate Menu Too on on/off
Translation Parameters Translations English
Italiano English French Spanish German
New functions available
A new and richer set of functions is now available to users. This set of functions allows users to:
• Convert, manipulate and extract data from and to a generic COM date structure. • Convert, manipulate and extract data from and to a generic COM variant structure • Access resource specification values in Process Segments • Evaluate any generic well-formed expression.
Incremental synchronization
The synchronization process between PM and BPM has been speeded-up by updating only the changed objects.
By the user point of view, nothing changes: all existing menu-voices regarding synchronization remain, all browsers that appeared, continued to appear as they were in previous version. The only thing a user can see is that only the objects modified from the plant or from the library side, are upgraded. In previous versions, all objects belonging to a plant were deleted and then re-instantiated.
Unicode Support
Unicode characters are supported in PM 5.0, even if they are not allowed in all places considered as programming variables or objects. Consequently, UNICODE characters are not allowed in the names of objects, classes, attributes, and in any item that can be referred by an expression. In general, it will not allowed to insert UNICODE characters in values of type SYMBOL. Any value of type TEXT, on the contrary, can accept UNICODE characters. In addition, a new attribute (Object-label) of type text has been added to any subclass of process-object (i.e.: SITE, AREA, CELL, UNIT, LOGICAL-CELL, LOGICAL-UNIT). By means of this attribute, the user can insert a “label” to any object, which can be expressed in any language (eastern Asia languages included)
PM Language configuration in SIT Mgmt Console
Now the language set in SIMATIC IT Management Console at PM start is used in PM as well. That language is used both in PM Server and any connected PM clients. The currently supported languages by PM Server are: English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. In case of not supported languages, PM Server will use the English language.
Multiple selection of libraries or Plants during loading
When loading a library or a plant into SIMATIC IT Production Modeler, a list is shown with the names of all possible libraries or plants. In previous versions, it was only possible to select and load one library or one Plant at a time. From PM 5.0, it is possible to select one or many libraries or plants and load all of then at the same time by the use of a check-box browser.
Recovery From crash
A new Recovery mechanism manages the Production Modeler failures as follow: During the normal behavior, all of the Rules/PO execution information is sent to an external process (which is a Recovery dedicated GSI). The recovery system was born from the idea of telling to another system what the first one was doing with a special focus on the status of internal breakpoints. In this way the recovered system is able to rebuild what the previous system was doing then pause all the executions and resume them. In our case, the recovery GSI will receive and store the executions data in the most efficient way. In case of failure (abnormal process termination), Production Modeler must be manually restarted.
The recovery GSI will read and give the stored information to Production Modeler. Production Modeler will receive the information regarding all the executions that were active at the failure time. Using this information Production Modeler will rebuild the internal data structures putting all the active Rules/PO in a paused state. After this phase, as for the Controlled Shutdown, all of the paused activities will be resumed according to the configured recovery-mode. In order to guarantee that this functionality will work correctly, we must be sure that the plant data structure will not change during the execution. For this reason the recovery mechanism will work only for plants whose status is IN-PRODUCTION.
New Configuration parameters for Recovery
The new Recovery mechanism can be tailored by PM users according to their needs, thanks to a set of new configuration parameters available in the Recovery Parameters option panel (new). The list of such parameters is the following:
• Recovery enabled true/false: allows to enable or disable the recovery engine, the default is false (disable)
• Recovery repository path: were to save files on the recovery-GSI host • Ask before recovery: if the user must explicitly acknowledge a recovery in case of re-
starting PM from a crash, the default is false (no confirm dialog) • Default recovery mode: manual, automatic, abort: sets the global behavior of the
recovery; the default value for this parameter is automatic. • Automatic TMO: see below • Manual TMO: see below
The automatic TMO and the manual TMO affects the recovery behavior of the rules with the recovery-mode set to timer. Basically: they allows to specify a recovery mode different according to how much time has been passed since last crash, For example, one can set recovery as automatic is the application has been restarted after few time (and the plant global status is reasonably the same as it were at the time of crash), but to switch in manual mode if the PM has been restarted for some reason after a bigger amount of time.
• Recovery Buffer Len: is the maximum length (in number of messages) of the buffer
towards recovery GSI; the default value is 1. The user can modify this value to choose between safety and performances. A value bigger than 1 allows PM rules to proceed without waiting for the saving of each single operation. A value of 1 forces PM to wait each single operation is saved on GSI before proceeding; in this way, the user can be sure that the recovery will reconstruct the exact status of running rules, but PM execution is slightly slower. Tests done show that, in case of buffer = 1, rules are slower of a value that ranges from 7% to 40%, according to the type of operations done.
• Recovery-Failure-Mode: if the recovery GSI crashes or it is unavailable PM stores data locally (when GSI is up again PM sends buffered data to it). If PM is not able to write on local drive and GSI is unavailable, PM acts according to the value of this parameter: • pause-executions: all executions are paused and resumed when the GSI is
available • disable-recovery: continue executions without recovery The default value is Pause-Executions
Unsolicited tag reading from GSI-RTDS
GSI-RTDS is the bridge between SIMATIC IT Production Modeler and RTDS tags (expressed in PM as cube-variables). In previous versions, that bridge worked on a polling basis; this means that it regularly performed a reading of the RTDS variables, which requires CPU time. Now a new polling class has been added. Tags belonging to that class send now their value to PM in an unsolicited way, as soon and only when the value changes. This eliminates the need to poll them, saving time, CPU work, and reducing network load.
Possibility to feedback KPI calculation result to PM
It is now possible to receive in PM feedbacks about KPI calculations made in PPA, by means of two new objects insertable in rules, PS rules, or PO rules: System-Ppa-DataReader and PPA-System-wait-for-exception The System-Ppa-DataReader object allows the user to activate KPIs, obtaining the result of their calculus. In execution, the system-ppa-data-reader schedules requested KPIS and waits until it receives all the results that the user requires, and then follows the normal path. If the KPI does not exist, PPA returns an error or the number of parameters is wrong, the false path will be activated. At the end of the rule, at the abort of the rule, or if the PPA connection is broken, the on-event and on-event-over-time KPIs still active will be automatically deactivated (at the PPA init in the case of broken connection). The Ppa-System-Wait-For-Exception object allows the user to activate KPIs, obtaining the results of the calculus of the KPI that do not comply with the user-defined filters (i.e. exceptions). Such object can wait for an arbitrary number of KPIs, like the previous one, but allows also defining a filter for each KPI specified. For each KPI specified, an output stub is added. In execution, the object waits until there is an exception to one of the filters specified. At this point, the rule’s execution will continue from the correspondent stub; if more than one KPI signal an exception, all relative output stubs are executed in parallel. At the end of the rule, at the abort of the rule, or if the PPA connection is broken, the cyclic KPIs still active will be automatically deactivated (at the PPA init in the case of broken connection).
Possibility to stop/abort/pause an Entry in SIMATIC IT Production Order Manager
It will be possible to activate from POM, the same operations that can be performed by the user in Production Modeler on PO/PS, namely: Pause, Resume, Abort. From a POMD client, some new menus will allow the user to pause/resume/abort a running Entry (PO or PS). The requested action will be sent to PM via POMGSI. PM will manage the POMD pause/resume/abort actions, exactly like the same actions activated by a PM Client.
Definition of Process Segments in PM and PDefM
In the version 6.1 of Production Suite, a new component, called PDefM, is introduced. Purpose of this component is to give a centralized and organized way to create and manage concepts listed in S95, namely product segment and product production rules. Up to the version 5.1 of Production suite, there was an overloading of meaning in Production operations defined using PM, especially for what concerns material handling. In that version, in fact, a PO had an explicit reference to a set of possible final materials, and any step of the PO rules, when defining associated materials, make this association for every final material listed. That approach had the following disadvantages: it caused a pretty complicated way of configuring, it made impossible to use the materials defined in PO in explicit calls to Material Manager, and finally it caused a huge number of data to be stored (each combination of material operation and final material). The introduction of PDefM component clarifies the overall structure, but it implies a change in the semantic of Production Operations. The major change foreseen is the introduction of Process Segment concept, as defined in S95. To represent that concept, a new class (Process Segment, shortly referred in the rest of this document as PS) has been defined in s95-industry-library. The Process-Segment class is a new type of production operation, and can be instantiated at the same physical level at which the Material-Production-Operation are: Site, Area, and Cell. The old classes (i.e.: MATERIAL-PRODUCTION-OPERATION and NON-MATERIAL-PRODUCTION-OPERATION) are anyway maintained in PM, with their current behaviour. The new class will have the main purpose to clearly mark the discontinuity introduced with process segment concept. PS will be the one exported in PDefM, and will be the ones that can be mapped in Product segments.
From user point of view:
• All currently defined applications will be treated exactly as they are now, without any risk related to upgrade
• To exploit PDefM benefits, the user has to explicitly define Process Segments (i.e.: adding PDefM to an existing application will have no effect without an explicit decision of the PM engineer)
Despite the fact that PSs are similar to POs, there are anyway some differences: • A PS can only be started by POM, or by another PS via a new type of step: Start-
Start-Segment can be ONLY defined in Process-Segment and can ONLY call Process-Segment Start-Product can be ONLY defined in Production-Operation and can ONLY call PO
• A PS has a set of resource specifications associated with. Resource Specifications represent the required equipment or material that must be sent by POM to PM and that can be used by PS rules. To access values of those specifications in run time, a dedicated set of functions has been designed. Those values can be sent to other SIMATIC IT components like Material Manager, or can be used to implement some logic inside the PS rule
Resources map the corresponding concept of S95, and in PM they are seen as the requirement of a process segment. To make an example from software engineering, process segments can be considered as APIs (primitives) exposed by a software component (in your case, it is your application made with PM), and resource specifications represent API I/O arguments. Please note that, differently from what specified in S95 theory, resources don’t include yet personnel specifications, which continue to be managed as for PO in previous versions.
Licensing Management
Starting from this version, it is no more necessary to configure the G2.OK file: SIMATIC IT licence management will be the only way to authorize Production Modeler. There will be two types of authorization related to Production Modeler:
• Unit-Count • Client-Count
The “unit-count” license check remains the same as the previous versions and is made in the following cases:
• Production Modeler Startup • Creation of New Process Objects • Load of a Plant • Import of a Plant from XBatch • Synchronization • Save of Plants and Libraries
The “client-count” licence specified the maximum number of clients that can be concurrently connected to PM server. That limit is checked each time a PM Developer Client (Telewindows) tries to get connected to PM Server. In addition to those extensions, the behaviour of PM in case of license failure is completely changed, to implement a “Nerve Box” approach, according to the PCS7 specifications. In previous versions, in case of license failure at startup, PM will not start. Now, in case of “unit-count” licence failure, PM will anyway start, but a dialog box is shown at a regular time or on some user activity; it still will not be possible to add new process-objects and save plants and libraries. In case of “client-count” licence failure, the new clients connection will be anyway accepted, but a “nerve Box” is sent to that clients only at a regular time, until the number of clients returns below limit.
PM provides now a complete support for managing XML data, by means of a set of dedicated steps allowing PM rules to:
• Import XML data into a G2 structured data • Export G2 structured data into XML data • Execute queries on XML data • Replace XML tags contents • View XML files • Read /Write XML files
Expressions on PM rule caller
As for method callers, even PM event deduction can now have an expression associated with. The expression is evaluated (only if the event-mode is set to “call”) at the end of the step execution, and has the same effect
New Caption of PM server window
When starting PM Server, the host name and the port number on which PM waits for external processes (e.g: PM Developer clients or PM COM interface) become connected are displayed on PM window title bar.
Multi COM Interface
Starting from this version, it is possible to have more than one PM COM interface running in the same PC, each one connected to a different PM server. The PM COM Interface is now composed by a main interface where the user can specify the different connections with individual PM servers, show what of them are running, create new connections, and configure settings valid for all interfaces. In case an older PM COM interface was already installed, when upgraded to the new multi Interface, the connection setting in effects are maintained as “default connection”. The following picture shows the new interface available.
If the user manually removes the file "mesad-upgrade.init" before the first launch of PM, when he/she tries to start PM, it to create the "mesad-upgrade.init", run for a while, then disconnect itself.
KPI Engineering
In previous PM versions, if some KPIs were associated to some PO and after they were deleted, the PO associations were not upgraded.
Known Technical Issues
PM Server
PM-local-variables
In a Production Operation (or in a rule assigned to a plant-object class) in a library, if you define a PM-local-variable and a set-variable object that changes the variable value to something, when you create an instance of the Production Operation, the variable actually set is the one specified in the library (and not the one created). Since PM-local-variable is an “old” PM object present here for compatibility with previous versions, we strongly suggest that you not use it in libraries; instead, use rule-local-variables which covers all PM-local-variables features and works properly.
Object palette
Roots and PM-event-deduction do not appear with the new layout in the Production Operation (or rule) palette, even if the object created from the palette has the correct layout. This is only an aesthetic problem and does not result in malfunctioning in run-time.
PM COM Interface
Argument restrictions
Using this version on PM COM Interface it’s not possible to use: • Methods with optional arguments • Methods with Enum arguments • Events having argument passed by reference Furthermore it’s not possible to use arguments of the following type: • Object • User Defined Type
Version 4.3SP2 of PM COM Interface has been rewritten in Visual C++ instead than Visual Basic, for performances reasons. Due to limitations of Microsoft Visual C++ anyway, it is not anymore permitted to use components written in Visual Basic and compiled as dll, that use non-modal forms (for further details on this issue, please see Microsoft PRB n.247791 (PRB: Modeless Forms in VB ActiveX DLL's Don't Display in VC++ Clients) The behavior of such components in PM COM Interface is the following: Any method not involving visualization of non-modal forms works correctly, while methods that visualize such forms don’t work; if the non-modal form is visualized in the class_initialize of the component, PM COM Interface cannot create the component.
Maximum number of re-connection attempts
When PM COM interface looses the connection with PM server, it automatically tries to reconnect, at a rate configurable by user. Unfortunately, if the disconnection time is high, the reconnection mechanism doesn’t work. In particular, the re-connection ceases to work after ~50 attempts. For example, if the reconnection period is set to 60 seconds, PM COM interface is not anymore able to reconnect after 50 minutes of continuous trying. If such a case occurs, PM COM Interface must be restarted in order to reconnect to PM server.
PM Display
Item-to-show
At present, the possibility of filtering plant objects visualized by the PM Display (e.g.: “show only Physical objects”) does not function properly and so is currently disabled.
Short Production Operations
If you run Production Operations at a fast rate (ex. one every few seconds), the display gets overloaded.
For some connectors third-party software should be preinstalled: • All SAP connectors need the SAP-GUI installation • MQSeries Client should be installed if MQSeries Connector will be used. • The connection with Oracle Database is carried out via the Oracle OLE DB Provider.
This provider must be installed separately. It is released as a component of the Oracle Client software. The ADO Connector is developed and tested against Oracle database version 10g.
Installing the Software
Two installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT DIS 1.1: - DIS Server - DIS Client
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Two help files are shipped with DIS 1.1. One of them describe how to create and configure the DIS project using the DIS Management console, another one describe using of DIS GSI interface to PM, DIS COM interface to PM and DIS Independent COM Connector for custom programming solutions. Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
What’s New
New DIS COMConnector interface
Now DISCOMConnector has second interface DISCOMConnector2. It is recommended to use it. The old interface is kept for compatibility reason.
Using DIS 1.1 you can communicate with PM through the native G2 GSI interface. The old PMCOMConnector is kept for compatibility reason. PMGSIInterface has now very effective cash system, that allows working with XML messaging using DIS extending Xpath query.
New connectors
DIS 1.1 has new subset of connectors: • Generic ADO Connector • MSMQ Connector
New DIS Kernel features
• It is possible to start DIS Connectors remotely. • The client connectors can participate in publish/subscribe pattern. You can define
subscriptions through the Management console.
Known Technical Issues
Features Not Currently Supported
Retrieving ParametersInfo is not supported by OraOLEDB, so parameters of the stored procedure cannot be download if you use OraOLEDB provider. Therefore, in this release it is not possible to use stored procedures with Oracle parameters.
The hierarchy among the Product Segments may result to be incorrect in the following situation: in Production Modeler a Process Segment ProcS1 has been defined that starts several times the same Process Segment ProcS2, which in turn starts other Process Segments.
Material names restrictions
The materials dragged in the materials grid associated to a material specification of a product segments, have a "path" indicating the place of the material as item in the BOM item tree. The path is stored with this syntax: <MatDefId> @#@ <MatDefVer> @#@ <BOMId> [@\@ <MatDefId> @#@ <MatDefVer> @#@ <BOMId> @#@ <GAN> @#@ <GAP>]* (GAN = Group Alternative Name, GAP = Group Alternative Priority) where usually the <...> represent non terminal symbols. If an element replacing the non-terminal symbols indicated contains the “@#@” substring, the application can have some unexpected behavior. For instance, the material row affected can be marked as incorrect by the "material configuration check" algorithm. In this case you can change (in MM) the name containing the “@#@” substring or you create the same material row as "absolute material" (not reference to BOM) so that the "material configuration check" algorithm will mark the row as correct.
Loop flag
The loop flag is not automatically managed by PDefM.
Usage of Decimal Separator in Methods The method ExportPPRList always uses the “dot” character as decimal separator. It's strongly recommended to set the character “dot” as decimal separator in the Regional Options (Numbers) of the machines where the method ImportPPRList may be invoked, in order to ensure the consistency between export and import.
The programming language used for the development of the server part of the component is now Visual C++ for all the modules: we do not have parts developed in VB any more. Please refer to compatibility notes.
Deployed modules
The server part of the component is not any more made up of an executable (POM.EXE in previous versions). Each available interface of the component is implemented by a DLL: OMAPI.DLL represents the “backward-compatibility” interface; POMSERVER2.DLL represents the “new” interface. Custom applications developed as clients of POM connecting to previous version may likely need to change the reference to the object and thus be recompiled.
New COM interface
The “new” interface is organized in a different way compared to the ones in previous versions, including the “backward-compatibility” one. Clients using this “new” interface have a single class to instantiate, and by means of this object they can access the specialized interfaces for the different functions (e.g. order management, entry management, etc)
COM interface for PM
The POM interface with PM via PmComInterface and COM is still available with “system objects” and “com logical units” in PM, for compatibility reasons, though bound to the “backward-compatibility” interface. The GSI interface process for communication between POM and PM must be active even when the “old” interface is used, because even in the “old” interface the Dispatch of the Entry is executed by the Component via this interface
Interface Methods Return Codes
Return codes in the PS 5.1 interface have been preserved for compatibility. Return codes in the PS 6.1 interface have been changed according to the general harmonization rules.
In the current version, the POM can only browse current modules. PO/PS can be started only on a plant that is loaded, current and versioned by PM.
PDefM specification
The specifications marked as 'PDefM' are not imported by POM.
Installing the Software
Two installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT POM 5.0: - POM Server - POM Client
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
Obsolete features
Control BOM
In PS 5.1 it was possible to associate Materials to the various steps represented in POM by means of the Control-BOM object, in terms of both what was foreseen and what has been actually used. In PS 6.1, the materials associated to an Entry are represented by a different kind of objects, Material Specifications, that better match other parts of the S95 standard, thus facilitating the exchange of information with other modules of the PS (e.g. PDefM). In PS 6.1, though, POM is still able to manage Control-BOM’s for compatibility with previous versions. The functions for managing Control-BOM’s are present only in the interface of the Component designed for “backward-compatibility”, whereas Material Specifications are managed in the “new” interface.
POM BOM Item Information
As a consequence of what previously described about Control-BOM, even the actual information related to the items of the control-bom are managed in a different way.
Information about the actual materials used during the execution of an Entry (actual quantity, lot/sublot, material definition id, etc used) are now located in the Material Specification entities.
What’s New
Process Segment vs PO
In PS 5.1 normal Entries – i.e. excluding the “job” ones – are associated to a PO in Production Modeler so that they were activating this PO at the moment of the dispatch, passing to it the foreseen arguments. In PS 6.1 we have also another type of object, the Process Segment, which has a role quite similar to the PO, but a different structure better matching the S95 standard. Entries associated to PO’s continue to exist in PS 6.1 keeping all the functionality they had in the past. Entries associated to Process Segments can coexist with the previous ones, but at the moment they have a lower degree of flexibility and less management methods available in the “new” interface, as they are currently focused on being the runtime correspondent of the Product Segments designed in PDefM.
PPR’s vs Order Templates
In PS 5.1 we were using Order Templates to engineer and predefine the structure of an Order in terms of Entries, sub-Entries, custom fields associated, etc. PS 6.1 features the new component PDefM which allows for preparing a PPR (Product Production Rule) for a Product, indicating the various operation steps (Product Segments) with the resources and parameters assigned to them. The PPR associated to a product is to become an Order/Entries structure following the definition of these Product Segments. Where applicable, especially for new projects, it is suggested to include PDefM in the configuration and use it to engineer more comprehensive information for Orders and Entries. However, PDefM is not a mandatory module in every bundle, thus the presence of Templates guarantees anyway the same functionality already present in previous versions.
Multi-value Custom Fields
A Custom Field may now be assigned a multi-value.
Categories for Custom Field
Custom Fields can now be associated to one or more categories.
Custom Field Type Constraints and Default Value
In this release the definition of Type Constraints and Default Value for Custom Field has been made clearer.
Instantiation of an Order from a PPR Defined in Simatic It PDEFM
While the Orders and Entries “PS 5.1 style” can still be created like in the past, with 6.1 we will often have Orders created from a Product Production Rule (PPR) that has been defined in PDEFM for the target material of the production. When an Order is instantiated from a PPR, the Properties defined in PDefM for the PPR become the Order Custom Fields. Entries generated from the Product Segments defined for a PPR have a structure that is different from those existing in 5.1: they are associated to a Process Segment in PM, rather than a PO; they have accompanying data with a clear structure like Material Specifications, Equipment Specifications, Parameters. Even the Execution Equipment is structured differently. Entries can be organized in a hierarchy, which is defined either by the definition of the corresponding product Segment in the PPR, or by the configuration of a Process Segment in PM that triggers the execution of other Process Segments. In any case, even when Entries are activated by a PM Process Segment, information attached to the Entry (materials, etc) are passed to the corresponding Process Segment only at the moment of the actual launch in execution of the Entry itself. Many copies of an Entry may be generated if the Entry is originated from a Product Segment that has been labeled as repeatable in the PPR. This deals with those situations where we need to repeat a certain step until a given goal is achieved (e.g. the density is within a range). Important: this feature is not available for Segments flagged as Routing Segments. Product Segments in the PPR may be related to each other by means of dependencies – e.g. B StartAfterEnd A – and the same dependencies are established between the corresponding Entries created by those product Segments.
Health-Check on a PPR for Creating an Order
In order to use a PPR to create an Order, POM requires some checks are made to ensure it can be used for correctly generating the Order/Entry structure. POM requires first that the PPR have been approved within PDefM. However, this fact alone is not sufficient to guarantee that the Order/Entry structure would be well-formed, thus an additional set of checks is to be made (health-check). Plus, most of the conditions verified by the health-check have some direct or indirect dependency on the time, meaning that it is necessary to repeat them later in order to be sure that no conditions exist that may invalidate. POM is capable to make this health-check: how often it is to be done heavily depends on the specific application. For more details on the health-check topic, please refer to the appropriate documentation.
Family and type on order/entry
It is possible to assign a family and a type to each Order and Entry, so that we get much more possibilities of grouping in order to facilitate accessing them and their info.
The communication with PM now operates via a dedicated channel (GSI) in both directions.
DTC Support
It is possible to define inside PM the execution of a series of methods as a transaction, i.e. in such a way that the modifications applied can be rolled back. The transaction can also be a distributed one meaning that it can involve more than one server. However, please consider that not all methods can support transactions, for not all of them perform actions that may be recoverable: for example, dispatching an Entry to PM.
UTC Support
Times are now managed as UTC+Bias in order to take into consideration also the possible differences in time zone between server and clients.
Unicode Support
Data now support Unicode.
Return error codes
The component methods are now defined according to the SIMATIC IT internal standard regarding error codes returned and naming convention.
Reworking/loop
It is possible to manage an entry with a “Process Segment” with the following constraints: the process segment cannot be a routing process segment and the entry cannot have any child.
Fixed Technical Issues
Log of custom field
On the previous version of POM under some circumstances the log information of a custom field associated to an order were not saved correctly.
All properties defined into specification are currently not used as filters for the specification values. This is also true for properties of execution equipment.
Specification parameters
All parameters defined for specification values are currently not used to override the product segment parameters. This is also true for parameters of execution equipment
Upgraded Entities
Most entities have acquired additional important functionality that is available in the “new” interface of the component. At the same time, for compatibility reasons, the capability of managing these entities in the “old” way has been conserved. However, the first time these entities are accessed by means of the “new” interface, the "old" one cannot use them any more. This is to protect against possible problems due to the fact that accessing via the “new” interface may imply the use of some new function, which is not available in the “old” one, thus potentially leading to problems. Example: Custom Fields in the “new” interface are capable of managing multi-value while the “old” one is not, so once a custom field is accessed via the “new” interface we cannot guarantee the “old” may safely access it again.
Dependencies
The dependencies can exist only between Entries within the same Order: there is no way to have dependencies defined between Entries belonging to different Orders. The dependencies are set between Entries at the moment the Order/Entry structure is instantiated, according to the definition made between the Product Segments in the corresponding PPR in PDefM. However, the set of methods for operating on these dependencies is not complete and does not allow fully operating on dependencies as it may be expected. Please refer to the specific documentation for details. POM does not yet check the fulfillment of dependencies upon request of dispatching an Entry: by the moment it is necessary to have this check made by some specifically developed part. Between the same couple of Entries it is not possible to define multiple dependencies of the same type: only one per type can be associated. Some dependencies overlap with corresponding definitions as “links”. However, by the moment, both links and dependencies are kept and managed by the component.
Orders and Entries of the “new” type, i.e. created by the instantiation of an Order following a PPR, may have limitations of use compared to the corresponding “old-style” entities, especially when referring to methods available. Please refer to the appropriate documentation.
Customization of the Entry-Id
Currently it is not foreseen by the component as product functionality that the ID of an Entry being created can be customized in some way.
Material Specifications
Some limitation exists on the operations that can be conducted on Material Specifications: for example, it is not possible to add a new Specification to the Entry. However, it is possible to alter the list of materials associated to a single existing Material Specification, even adding materials to the list itself. Please refer to the specific documentation for details. The identifier of a Material Specification is unique over the same Segment. For this reason you cannot have two Material Specifications with the same name, one being “input” the other being “output”.
Equipment Specifications
The list Equipments included into a single Equipment Specification is interpreted by the system as made up of mutually exclusive items. It is not yet allowed to have ExpectedLevelOfDetail=Class for an Equipment Specification in POM. In case an Equipment Specification is passed to POM by PDEFM in such a way, POM automatically changes the “level” of the Specification to “EquipmentId” and fills the corresponding list of with all the equipment instances currently belonging to the specified class.
Parameters
Parameters associated to an Entry are bound to be single-value. Upon creation of an Order from PPR, Parameters associated to a Segment having source=PDEFM, i.e. not defined in the interface of the Process Segment, are not imported by POM thus not associated to the Entry corresponding to the Segment.
Split Operation on Entries
In this release of the component it is not yet possible to perform a Split operation over Entries of the “new” type, i.e. created from a Product Segment of a PPR. The Split operation is of course still available for the Entries created according to the “PS 5.1” style.
At present Gantt Chart does not support Unicode representation for strings. Gantt Chart visualization is not yet capable of managing information contained in the definition of dependencies: it still uses “link” information.
Log of custom field migration
During the update of the database the wrong log information of custom fields will be deleted.
The backup operation needs a directory on which to create and save the backup file, the restore operation needs a directory to restore the file from. In both cases, if the directory is on a remote workstation, the Windows user logged onto the workstation where the backup and restore operations are performed from needs to have the right permissions to access this remote directory, otherwise the desired operation cannot take place. The path is expressed in UNC format.
Decimal properties
Values of decimal properties support up to 23 decimal digits.
Installing the Software
Two installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT MM 5.0: - MM Server - MM Client
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
Obsolete features
BoM versioning management
Due to a strong functionality changes, the previous BoM versioning management is no longer supported in the new MMEngineering COM interface but is supported only in the MMServer COM compatibility interface.
Due to a strong functionality changes, the previous Material Definition management is no longer supported in the new MMEngineering COM interface but is supported only in the MMServer COM compatibility interface.
What’s New
DTC Support
It is possible to define inside PM the execution of a series of methods as a transaction, i.e. in such a way that the modifications applied can be rolled back. The transaction can also be a distributed one meaning that it can involve more than one server. However, please consider that not all methods can support transactions, for not all of them perform actions that may be recoverable: for example, dispatching an Entry to PM.
Closer Integration with PM
The communication with PM now operates via a dedicated channel (GSI) in both directions.
UTC Support
Times are now managed as UTC+Bias in order to take into consideration also the possible differences in time zone between server and clients.
Unicode Support
Data now support Unicode.
Versioning and Life Cycle
Versioning is supported for the following engineering objects: Material Definitions. The concept of lifecycle management includes versioning control but it also includes e.g., workflow management, the specification of conditions for changing version-statuses etc. The following version-statuses are supported:
• In editing • In testing • Ready for approval • Approved • Obsolete
As default behaviour, a change in the version status will only be allowed as shown in the figure below.
Approved
Ready-for-
In testing
In editing
Obsolete
FIGURE: Default version-statuses.
Multilanguage for GUI, components and ActiveXs
SIMATIC IT User Interfaces are available in different languages. Current language support for Material Manager is as follows: • Contextual Text: English, German. • Application Data: any type of string using single-byte character set.
Set of values for Properties
There is the possibility to define a Material Property as a set of values.
Time Stamp for method/event
The Time Stamp method indicate the exact Time of method invocation associated to all SIMATIC IT Material Manager methods that provides data or events to be archived for traceability purposes (e.g. all methods/events related to materials movement/transformation/etc.). This is an optional parameter. If the Time Stamp is not entered, it can be considered the System Time retrieved during the method execution.
Only One Standard GUI for RunTime
Runtime GUI is provided by SIMATIC IT Client Application Builder (CAB) using the set of run time controls provided by Material Manager component.
The MMQueryBuilder COM interfaces provide an advanced search mechanism. For further details see the relative documentation of Component.
Material Property Grouping
It is possible to configure groups of properties, and to associate properties to such groups.
Locking enhancement in Material Manager
The “Blocked” status may be propagated automatically to the sublots that used the locked lot/sublot (by a transform or a split).
Alternative BoM
It is possible to define alternative BOMs for a product. SIMATIC IT Product Definition Manager will manage the list of alternative BOMs to be used by a product. NOTE: A BOM should have the possibility to be set as Primary. A BOM could contain several BOM Items that point to a specific version of the Material Definition (Row Material or Produced Material). It is possible to define alternative BOM Items. The BOM Items should have a Priority specifying in which order they should be used for substitution. A BOM Item could refer to a version of specific Material Definition without wildcards. If the version of the Material Definition is not specified then the “Current” Material Definition will be referred.
Material Definition visible in Location View
The Material Manager Display Location View allow the user to browse lots and sublots according the location they belong to. Material Definition information has been added in the grid that already shows most of the material lot and material sublot information.
Material Grouping
There is the possibility to group material definitions. One Material Definition can belong to more than one “Material Not Template Class” (Group). There will be no properties inheritance. Material Not Template Class properties will belong only to that Class and they will be used for query and grouping criteria purposes.
Unit of Measure conversion
The list of Unit of Measurements (UoM) is configurable. It is possible to configure the calculation of how to translate one UoM to another.
Material Manager Display split Material Manager data are displayed in several dialogs and components. The existing dialogs have been splitted in configuration and run-time part as following: • SIMATIC IT MATERIAL MODEL CONFIGURATION
This allow the user to configure • Material Classes • Material Definition • Material Property • Bill of Material • Unit of Measure • Material Status • Material Type Inventory • Plant Model Management
• SIMATIC IT RUNTIME MATERIAL MANAGEMENT
This allow the user to create and update • Material Lot • Material Sublot • Material Trace (Lot/Sublot Management)
• HANDLING UNIT MANAGEMENT
Commit to field enhancement
In SIMATIC IT Material Manager, it is possible to link a lot to an order. This is done by selecting the lot and in the special property “Commit to” write the name of the order. The name of the order is a string. In order to allow the user to associate more than one order to a material lot, the “Commit To” special property is able to manage multi values. No check for the presence of the corresponding Order in POM is performed.
Lots status propagation on sub-lots
Material Manager supports automatic propagation of status changes from lots to sub-lots.
Bill of Material in Material Definition
The Bill of material is part of the material definition. The bill of material might contain the references to other materials; eventually a material is considered a raw material and does therefore not have a bill of material.
Simultaneous visualization of Backward and Forward Genealogy
It is possible to see from which materials a certain material (end-product or intermediate material) has been created. This is called the backward genealogy.
It is possible to see in which materials a certain material (raw material or intermediate material) is used. This is called the forward genealogy. By selecting a material is possible to see both the backward and the forward genealogy at the same time.
Validity date for Lots/SubLots
The Validity date fields have been added to Lots and Sublots. Validity date indicates the time limit for material usage. After the validity date is expired the material should not be used.
Product Definition Manager Support
SIMATIC IT Product Definition Manager is able to retrieve the following material information • List of Material Types • List of Material Classes, instances and their properties (e.g. filters, consumables, etc…)
according the types of materials that are product specific and needed for the manufacturing
• List of Material Definitions with ID, Major Version and Minor Version information and Material BoM given the Material Type and/or the Material Class
• List of Bill of Material • Objects with versions can’t be deleted • Every Material Definition with more versions must have at least one Version set as
‘Current’
Database views for Report Manager
In order to facilitate reporting of SIMATIC IT Components data, specific database views have been defined. SIMATIC IT Report Manager uses these database views.
Transform and Move Out in one step
The system is able to process two material steps within one recipe phase. At genealogy level, you have a single operation traced.
Transform and Move In in one step
The system is able to process two material steps within one recipe phase. At genealogy level, you have a single operation traced.
The import procedure may fail if two locations belonging to equipments of different levels (Site, Area, Cell, Units) have the same short name in SIMATIC IT PM.
HUT Locked/Reserved Statuses
In the previous MM 4.3 it was possible to manage custom Locked and/or Reserved statuses for a HUT as separate statuses. In the new version it is no more possible because the Locked and/or Reserved statuses have been transformed in boolean flags. For the compatibility reason, the following methods hold their functionality but, when a new Locked or Reserved status is created, it will be treated as normal HUT Statuses so that the system will create them in the HUT Status table and not more in the HUT Locked or HUT Reserved Status table: • DeleteHUTStatus • LoadHUTStatus • GetHUTStatus • InsertHUTStatus • UpdateHUTStatus
Common Locations
If the SIMATIC® IT Material Manager Display 4.3 > Plant Model > Common Locations tool is invoked, the SIMATIC® IT Business Process Modeler needs to be already running. Each Location Identifier Parameter on MM Server Compatibility Interface must be filled with Location Path (excluding Location Creation methods).
Configuration files
The SIMATIC® IT Material Manager and SIMATIC® IT Material Manager Display 4.3 INI files have to be modified manually. Please follow the instructions in the INI files themselves. Only the password cannot be changed by manually editing the file, as it is encrypted; in order to change it you need to “show” the MM Server dialog screen and use the “change password” button. Please note that if upgrading from a previous installation of MM the password is automatically upgraded, i.e. it is retrieved from the previous INI file and rewritten encrypted to the new one.
The SIMATIC® IT Material Manager Display 4.3 and 5.0 combo boxes, tree views, list views and MSHFlexGrid controls can load a maximum of 32767 items to avoid overflow. The limitation on these controls is set by Microsoft. The exceeding items will not be loaded into these Windows controls. This limitation applies also to the Runtime OCX Controls. The new MM Display could not work properly if the old MMD is running.
Child Bill of Material
A Bill of Material (BoM) that contains another Bill of Material as child item has the following constraint: a BoM can appear only once as child in a BoM. This limitation is true only if you use the MMServer compatibility interface because in the new MMEngineering interface the BoM management is strongly changed. The MM Server compatibility interface doesn’t support a SubItem in an Item of a BoM. This new limitation is due to strong changes in a new BoM management.
Lot and Sublot identification restriction
Attention must be paid when using the methods “AddLot” and “AddSublot” specifying the id of the Lot/Sublot as input. If this id is purely numeric and is equal to any of the error return codes, you may have a wrong behavior in the calling client, as it has no way to distinguish the error from a successful insertion returning the id of the item inserted. As a consequence, error codes should not be used as id values. This issue is true only if you use the MMServer compatibility interface. In the new MMRuntime interface the issue is resolved.
Default values for methods parameters
When calling MM methods from “method-caller” objects in rules / production operations within SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler, please consider that optional parameters must always be explicitly indicated when configuring the “method-caller” object in Production Modeler; if the parameter is of no interest for the specific call, it must be set to the default value expected by MM (this value is available in the reference documentation). Here is a tentative list of the most commonly used methods that require this kind of attention:
Method Parameter Name Default value
Type
GetSQLServerDateTime blnUTC FALSE BooleanCopyClass copy_also_defs 1 Long AddClassProp Inherit 1 Long AddDefAndSetProperties matl_def_process_scope 14000 Long UpdateBoM vdblQuantity -1 Double CopyBom vlngCopyAlsoItem 1 Long AddBoMItem vintMatlBomItemPct 100 Integer
Three installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT PRM 2.0: - PRM Server - PRM Client - PRM Administrator - PRM Com Wrapper
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Documentation
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
What’s New
UTC Management
A configuration option allow you to work with three different date/time representations:
- UTC: all date/time fields are expressed in UTC time. - UTC+client BIAS: all date/time fields are exposed using the client local time. - UTC+server BIAS: all date/time fields are exposed using the server local time.
Unicode support
All textual fields support UNICODE character sets.
Distributed transaction
Using the new COM interface of the GSI one it possible to supply to all methods a transaction cookie that allows PRM server to participate in a distributed transaction, coordinated by Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
Closer Integration with PM
The communication with PM now operates via a dedicated channel (GSI) in both directions.
Starting from this version some new interfaces are provided:
- COM interfaces: provides Configuration, Definition and Runtime functionality. - GSI interface: provides functionality to be used from within Production Modeler using
a dedicated channel for communication between PM and PRM. The previous COM interfaces are still available for compatibility.
Workschedule assignment
Starting form this version it is possible to assign a WorkSchedule to a Person without requiring any other assignment between person and group.
PRM RuntimeGrid OCX
This new OCX allows managing runtime PRM functionalities (Worktimes and PersonnelLog). It is available as a separate OCX (in PRMRunTimeGrid.dll) and also integrated into PRM Presentation Client.
B2MML Support
A preliminary support to B2MML standard is added. These are the new methods exposed: • GetB2mmlData: the method gets one of the following Personnel Manager objects
(Personnel Class, Person, Qualification Test Specification, Work Schedule) in B2MML schema format.
• GetB2mmlDataList: the method gets one or more Personnel Manager object (Personnel Class, Person, Qualification Test Specification, Work Schedule) in B2MML schema format.
• ChangeB2mmlData: the method change one of the following Personnel Manager objects (Personnel Class, Person, Qualification Test Specification).
• AddB2mmlData: the method adds one of the following Personnel Manager objects (Personnel Class, Person, Qualification Test Specification).
• CancelB2mmlData: the method remove one of the following Personnel Manager objects (Personnel Class, Person, Qualification Test Specification).
Known Technical Issues
Common Data Configuration / Configuration and Presentation Client
If for any reason the client loses communication with the server, a warning message box should appear. The client must be close and launched again to re-establish the communication.
SIMATIC® IT Production Operation Recorder Display ActiveX can't be run in standalone mode, so it must be installed together with SIMATIC® IT Production Operation Recorder Display, SIMATIC® IT Production Order Manager Display or with SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler Display. SIMATIC® IT Production Operation Recorder Display must be installed together with SIMATIC® IT Production Operation Recorder Display ActiveX.
POPR SQL Database
Due to heavy usage of SQL Server database, could be a strongly recommended practice to reserve a dedicated machine to POPR, with its own SQL database. In this case:
the Registry key Standalone, existing under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Siemens\SIMATIC_IT_KEYS\SIMATIC IT Production Operation Recorder Server\5.0\Database must be set to T (the default value is F)
the Registry keys, existing under the same path: • Initial Catalog • Data Source • Login Name • Login Password must be set manually.
Installing the Software
Three installation options exist for SIMATIC® IT POPR 5.0: - POPR Server - POPR Display - POPR Display ActiveX
Hardware and software Requirements
Refer to general requirement for SIMATIC® IT Production Suite 6.1.
Please refer to the general Documentation section for more information.
Obsolete features
There are no obsolete features.
What’s New
Versioning - POPR to log the usage of the versions
The Plant version is part of the execution recording, in order to store the exact execution context.
Closer Integration with PM
The communication with PM now operates via a dedicated channel (GSI) in both directions.
Multilanguage for GUI, components and ActiveXs - Contextual text to support UNICODE
POPR server and the data repository support UNICODE. The Backup/Restore management is made through UNICODE files.
Definition of Process Segments and Production Steps in PM and PDefM
The execution of the Process Segments is recorded in POPR, in order to know the runtime values of the related properties, arguments, equipment specification, material specification and personnel specifications.
Windows terminal server support
POPR, POPRD and POPRDX read their settings from the Registry, without needing any configuration files. This allows supporting Windows Terminal Server.
Unique Database for MCOCore and MCOProd
POPR supports the unique SIMATIC® IT Production Suite Database.
The POPR, POPR Display and POPR Display ActiveX Ini files have to be modified manually. Please follow the instruction in the Ini files themselves or read the appropriate section in the Production Suite Installation Manual, available in the \Documentation folder of the setup CD-ROM.
Known Technical Issues
Unicode support
POPRD and POPRDX don’t support UNICODE.
Problems under heavy load situation
In particular situations, with a lot of Production Operations managed by SIMATIC® IT Production Modeler, POPR could have problems to manage its internal queues.
MS Office compatibility
MS Office is not required as a prerequisite for POPR Display, however if you decide to install it you are required to install SP2 as well. In the case where SP2 is not installed launching POPR Display will automatically call the MS Windows MS Office 2000 Installation screen to appear and you will be asked to install certain components included in SP2
Visualization limitation
In POPR Display can be shown no more than 500 nodes in the TreeView, if these nodes represent Steps.
Upgrading from older version
Since version 4.3 Pilot, POPR stored procedures are encrypted. If you try to import data from a database version 4.3 Pilot, 4.3, 4.3 SP1, 4.3 SP2 or 4.3 SP3 those stored procedures are not transferred. You need to restore those stored procedures launching POPR server, stopping the database connection and choosing the button “Restore encrypted stored procedures”.
SIMATIC® IT CIB 2.0 is not officially supported by this product version. Although the component is installed Siemens will not provide any support until the next product version.
