ExperTune Inc., in Hartland, Wis., started developing its PlantTriage product in 2000, and needed a robust, high performance historian packaged within the application. ExperTune selected Canary Labs, based in Martinsburg, Pa., as its historian partner for the company’s expertise and knowledge with its historian and the OPC specifications. This allowed ExperTune to concentrate on automating performance improvement in process plants. Using the OPC Foundation’s OPC-DA and OPC-HDA standards, for data access and historical data access, ExperTune and Canary Labs were able to seamlessly merge Canary Labs’ Trend Historian into the PlantTriage product. By using the OPC standards, the two companies were able to work closely together to bring the product to market more quickly. John Gerry, president and founder of ExperTune, says, “OPC has helped us to deliver on the promise of ‘open.’ We access real-time data directly from over 400 controllers, without having to worry about communications issues. Our development efforts can be totally focused on creating cutting-edge tools for process performance improvement.”PlantTriage is a plant-wide Performance Supervision System. Process data are collected by Trend Historian through the OPC-DA interface. PlantTriage then reads historical data from the database using the OPC-HDA interface. It runs calculations on this data to pinpoint opportunities for performance improvement in instrumentation, controllers and equipment. Results are stored back into Trend Historian through OPC-DA, trended with Trend Link, and ranked by economic importance. PlantTriage discovers and prioritizes the most important opportunities to improve the process. This product allows corporate management to see the bigger picture, coordinate activities and measure results. Both Canary Labs and ExperTune are members of the OPC Foundation and are continuing their on-going collaboration while implementing the OPC Unified Architecture standard within their products for future releases.For more information on OPC-based historian solutions from Canary Labs, visit www.canarylabs.com.
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