Distributed Historization System for Industrial Data Security
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial processes generate vast amounts of data from sensors and control elements, making it challenging to efficiently store and access historical data across multiple locations and sources, while ensuring data security and user access control.
Innovation Solution
A distributed historian system that stores data on a server, enabling access from various locations through a configurator module, data source registration, and secure data upload mechanisms, using cloud storage and advanced data visualization techniques to streamline data access and management.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If data is stored centrally on a server to enable access from multiple locations, then data accessibility and sharing are improved, but system complexity and security management become more difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments data storage and access management into distributed components. Multiple historians can be deployed across different locations, each storing local data while maintaining standardized interfaces. This allows data to be accessible from multiple locations without requiring a single complex centralized system, reducing overall system complexity while maintaining versatility.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces standardized data interfaces and communication protocols as intermediaries between data sources, historians, and access points. These intermediaries simplify the complexity of direct connections by providing a uniform layer of interaction, enabling multi-location access without increasing underlying system complexity.
2Reliability
If granular user access control is implemented to ensure data security, then security and privacy are improved, but system complexity and operational overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements universal access control mechanisms that can be applied across multiple historians and data sources using the same standardized interfaces. Rather than implementing separate access control systems for each data source, a unified approach is used that maintains granular security while reducing operational complexity through consistency and reusability.
3Loss of information
If data from thousands of sensors is collected and stored to maintain accurate historical records, then data completeness and analysis capability are improved, but storage requirements and data management complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments historical data storage across multiple distributed historians rather than consolidating all data in a single location. Each historian stores data from its local data sources, maintaining complete historical records distributed across the system. This segmentation reduces the storage burden on any single system while maintaining overall data completeness.
Data Source
AI summary
A system for historizing process control data. A configurator module registers a data source device with a historian server and indicates to the historian server to generate data source registration information for identifying the registered data source device. The historian server generates and stores the data source registration information. The historian server also generates a connection token comprising the data source registration information. The configurator module forwards the connection token to the data source device, which stores the token and sends it to the historian server with data. The historian server compares the connection token received from the data source device to the connection token stored by the historian server, wherein if they match, the historian server stores the data from data source device.