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Mining, Metals and Minerals

The metals, mining and minerals (MMM) industries are facing a whole host of challenges in order to stay competitive in today’s unpredictable global marketplace. They must incorporate innovative technologies that will increase production and reduce operating and maintenance costs. The mining and refining industry spans a wide variety of applications and environments. As such, its process control and production information delivery systems need to have special attributes that include coping with geographically distributed situations and rugged environments while integrating diverse and disparate technologies that have been adopted over possibly decades. SCADA solutions must address the most pressing issues facing mining companies today such as improve time to market, deliver capability and cost-effectively and provide security and reliability.

Open architecture

Open architecture HMI/SCADA framework enables users to mix-and-match products from different vendors to develop solutions that suits their needs better than those restricted to a single vendor's product offering. Open standards such as OPC, SQL, SOAP, HTTP protect your automation investment from manufacturers' proprietary technology obsolescence that can come with changes in the company structure, ownership or infrastructure requirements. Open architecture allows development of highly specialized components that can access even the most exotic RTUs, PLCs, DCSs. Read more about CSWorks architecture in the Architecture Basics section.

Web-enabled distributed operations

CSWorks-powered solutions enable monitoring and control of multiple locations with one software system. Not only can you monitor and access individual facilities, but you can also control entire plant or mine operations across intranets via wireless devices without compromising security. Make operators and managers more efficient with flexible access to data wherever they may be. Read more about CSWorks distributed architecture in the Distributed Architecture section.

Platform- and browser-independent thin client

CSWorks-powered client applications run on Windows and Mac platforms using free browser plug-in Microsoft Silverlight as runtime engine. Increase ROI, reduce software maintenance cost by using zero-administration web client. With CSWorks web client, end users no longer need to install any additional software, licenses and individual HMI screens on each client station. Files and licensing are server-based for trouble-free deployment and maintenance.

Powerful Alarming subsystem

CSWorks alarming components can be configured to scale out and to provide redundancy for mission-critical applications. Alarm history is saved in an SQL database, giving you a notable degree of flexibility to incorporate analysis tools of your choice. Operators work with Alarm Summary panels that can be configured individually according to their preferences and needs. When acknowledging an alarm, operators can enter a comment to record the actions taken.

Data archiving to secure standard databases

CSWorks stores collected historical data to industry standard databases, including Microsoft SQL Server, mySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL. Using standard databases provides long-term maintenance, reporting and retrieval throughout the retention period.

Live and historical data trends

Data collected from any data source at any facility can be quickly and easily visualized in CSWorks Trend panel. Information from different data sources of different types can be presented on a single chart with an option to export chart data to a spreadsheet file (watch the educational video).

Internationalization

System integrators needing to deploy their products around the world can define multiple languages and engineering unit conversions for their applications. Advanced user components included in the CSWorks setup package - Alarm Summary and Trend Control - support various popular languages (see screenshots of our Alarm Summary and Trend Control). Language switching can be implemented in several ways and can be performed during runtime, users just need to refresh their browsers.

User access management

CSWorks-based solution can be integrated with existing web-based user access management infrastructure. System administrators can restrict access to specific screens and features on a per-user basis. Server-side security checks prevent unauthenticated users from accessing the system, protecting the solution from sophisticated hacker attacks.