Most products designed by industry suppliers to connect plant floor systems to the enterprise typically focus on middleware hardware and/or software. To put it more simply, most plant floor-to-enterprise connections are bolt-on products of one sort or another designed to move data between two disparate systems.
GE Intelligent Platforms has taken a somewhat different approach by offering a combination of its Proficy Historian 5.0 and Proficy Historian Analysis. This combined product reportedly allows companies to contextualize, analyze and visualize huge amounts of data and act on it to improve their operations.
While using historians for production analysis and decision-making may not sound so revolutionary, GE argues that its approach in combining these two software tools differs in that it is designed not just to present production data, but to “facilitate a conversation between IT and senior management.” The company says the combination of these historian tools creates an “enterprise operations intelligence platform that accelerates complete context in the decision making process.”
This contextual presentation of data is possible, according to GE, because Historian 5.0 allows for multiple data stores so that companies can separate regulatory data from process data for differing requirements. Data stores are a relatively new concept in time series data management, which gives users more control over how their archive software performs, how data gets managed, and how system resources are allocated to reduce overall cost of ownership, improve performance, and enable compliance.
Proficy Historian Analysis contributes Web-based visualization of historian trend data, reporting, search capability and collaboration. With this tool, engineers can drag and drop historian tags into trend analyses to create reports on the fly using an Internet connection, thereby allowing them to perform troubleshooting from any location.
Proficy Historian 5.0 features more than 15 million tags on a single server with upwards of 3,000 client/collector connections and is able to archive 256GB of data with microsecond sampling. Its data management capabilities feature tiered data management strategies using server-to-server capability to help companies comply with the Food & Drug Administration’s 21CFR Part 11 and other regulatory requirements.
From an IT perspective, GE designed the Proficy software platform to be a scalable data management platform that features built-in data collection and high data compression, while maintaining control and business system independence to reduce the need for customization when integrating two disparate sources of data.
To help support its claims of the strategic benefit offered to companies by the combined historian software package, GE has released results of its own use of the tools at GE Energy’s Monitoring and Diagnostics Centers. In that application, GE claims that Proficy Historian has reduced the data footprint of monitoring more than 1500 turbines in 60 countries from 50 terabytes to 10. Year-to-year degradation analysis on a turbine, which previously could not be done online due to the massive storage limitations, took two weeks to complete. With Proficy Historian, this same task is now done online and can be completed in one hour.
For more information: www.ge-ip.com/historian.
To read more about how to databases — relational and times series — can improve your understanding of production operations, see the October 2012 feature “Databases: The Art and Science of Production Knowledge”.
