Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that one of its major platform products for the industrial automation and control business, the ProSafe®-RS safety instrumented system (SIS), has received a Science and Technology Award in the Excellent Product category from the China Instrument and Control Society (CIS).

The award was presented on September 23 in a ceremony that was conducted at the opening of the 25th International Conference and Fair for Measurement Instrumentation and Automation (Miconex 2014), a CIS-sponsored event in Beijing, China. Yokogawa China Co., Ltd., a Yokogawa subsidiary, accepted the award certificate on Yokogawa’s behalf.

The CIS Science and Technology Award was established by the National Office for the Science & Technology Awards and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, and is considered to be highly prestigious and influential. This year, 21 products won this award in the Excellent Product category, and it is particularly noteworthy that Yokogawa was the only non-Chinese company to receive this honor. This award for ProSafe-RS is the first time an SIS has won this honor, and it comes in recognition of our success in supplying many ProSafe-RS SISs in China which can be attributed to the high reliability of the ProSafe-RS and the enhancement to plant operations that comes through integration of ProSafe-RS and the Yokogawa CENTUM® VP integrated production control system. CENTUM VP received this award last year, making this the second consecutive year that we have received this award.

In energy and raw materials industries such as oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and chemicals, there is a strong demand for solutions that will help to ensure a safer workplace. Safety instrumented system can detect hazardous conditions and initiate an emergency shutdown. To improve plant safety, the Chinese government is recommending the use of safety instrumented systems. Yokogawa will continue to provide products and other solutions that can enhance both operational efficiency and safety in China.

Exida, a global supplier of functional and process safety products, services, and certifications has released CyberPHAx™, a tool that allows users to effectively conduct a Cyber Risk Assessment to identify potential cyber-attacks and to document existing or planned countermeasures to estimate residual risk of a cyber-attack.

“We live in an increasingly connected world, where it is now possible for a person behind a PC to take over a plant’s control system with ill intent,” says Iwan van Beurden, exida’s director of product development. “CyberPHAx provides the ability to thoroughly conduct a Cyber Risk Assessment allowing you to identify potential weaknesses in your existing infrastructure and plan for additional countermeasures if necessary.”

CyberPHAx™ is a Process Hazards Analysis (PHA) tool tool that can be used by engineering personnel in project, process safety, information technology, and process control, as well as plant management, and operations personnel.

CyberPHAx™guides users through the Cyber Risk Assessment process, effectively focusing the user on the task at hand, identifying types of cyber-attacks, potentially leading to hazardous events and their associated risks. Once the severity of a potential cyber-attack is understood, existing or planned countermeasures can be documented allowing an estimate of residual risk. If the tolerable risk target is not met, recommendations can be documented to lower the risk to a tolerable level.

Rosemount Tank Gauging System from Emerson has been certified for functional safety by Exida, the global leader in functional safety certification for the process industries, ensuring that it meets the functional safety requirements for Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 3 capability per IEC 61508: 2010.

“Emerson has clearly demonstrated a very high quality design process that meets the rigorous IEC 61508: 2010 requirements, “says John Yozallinas, exida Evaluating Assessor. “They have a thorough development process which helps ensure the delivery of products that achieve high levels of functional safety.”

“The tank gauging market is rapidly moving toward the use of IEC 61508 certified devices,” says Christian Skaug, Senior Technical Product Manager at Emerson. “We are confident choosing exida as our Certification Body because their program provides our customers with the necessary information, and the third party assurance of our high design quality.”

The Rosemount solution integrates easily with your existing network, DCS or host computer system. It features emulation possibilities of other vendors´ level devices, so independent of measurement technology, a system upgrade is easy.

A Rosemount Tank Gauging system can be based on IEC 62591 (WirelessHART), be traditionally wired, or integrate both system design types.

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Yokogawa Electric Corporation has announced that its CENTUM® VP production control system has obtained the ISASecure® Embedded Device Security Assurance (EDSA) certification from the ISA Security Compliance Institute (ISCI).

Cybercrime and cyber warfare are on the rise worldwide, and are growing ever more sophisticated. Recent prominent cases of industrial sabotage and espionage have escalated these concerns. Companies in the oil, petrochemical, power, and other industries are increasingly vigilant about such intrusions, and are being careful to check a product’s cyber security features before purchasing it. To assure customers of the high reliability of its products, Yokogawa obtained the ISASecure EDSA certification for the CENTUM VP production control system through a process that involved an examination by the CSSC (Control System Security Center) Certification Laboratory. This is the second Yokogawa product to receive ISASecure EDSA certification; the ProSafe®-RS safety instrumented system received the same certification earlier this year.

Nobuaki Konishi, vice president of the PA Systems Business Center in Yokogawa’s Industrial Automation Platform Business Headquarters, had the following to say about this development: “Yokogawa is continually striving to provide its customers optimum security solutions for their control systems by such means as developing highly secure systems and instruments and providing operational support services." He went on to say, “Yokogawa aims to strengthen its relationships with customers by demonstrating the reliability of its security solutions.”

The ISCI promotes various security evaluation initiatives and is comprised mainly of ISA members. The ISASecure program has been developed by the ISCI with the goal of accelerating the industry-wide improvement of cyber security for industrial automation and control systems (IACS). It achieves this goal by offering a common industry-recognized set of device and process requirements that drive device security, simplifying procurement for asset owners and device assurance for equipment vendors. The ISASecure EDSA certification has three elements: communication robustness testing (CRT), functional security assessment (FSA), and software development security assessment (SDSA), and is based on the IEC 62443-4 standard.