Embedded Historian Aggregator for Industrial Data Exchange
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional industrial control systems lack the ability to seamlessly exchange data between various components of an enterprise, particularly in global manufacturing settings, and are not equipped to handle real-time data collection and optimization effectively, which hinders productivity and compliance with regulations like 21 CFR Part 11.
Innovation Solution
An embedded historian system with an aggregator component that automatically triggers events to collect and aggregate data from third-party sources, providing a direct interface to controllers without a transitional layer, thus enhancing data exchange rates and enabling efficient data management and troubleshooting.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If a PC-Historian with transitional layer is used to record data, then data storage and retrieval capabilities are improved, but data exchange rate and real-time performance deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the historian functionality from the controller backplane and implements it as a standalone embedded historian on a separate processor. This removes the transitional layer bottleneck while maintaining data collection and storage capabilities, thereby improving data exchange rate without sacrificing storage capacity.
Solution Approach 2:
The embedded historian acts as an intermediary between the controller and external systems, directly accessing controller data through the backplane without requiring a transitional layer. This intermediary position enables high-speed data collection while maintaining comprehensive storage and retrieval capabilities.
2Device complexity
If conventional control system architecture is used, then controller operations are simplified, but data exchange between enterprise components becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The embedded historian provides multiple functions including data collection, storage, retrieval, and export to various external systems. This multi-functionality enables the controller to maintain simple internal architecture while achieving versatile data exchange capabilities with enterprise components through the embedded historian's ability to interface with multiple data destinations.
3Productivity
If data is collected from multiple global manufacturing sites, then productivity and optimization improve, but system complexity and data management difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a distributed architecture where each manufacturing site has its own embedded historian that independently collects and manages local data. This segmentation allows each site to maintain simple local data management while the standardized embedded historian interface enables centralized aggregation and analysis of data from multiple global sites, improving productivity without proportionally increasing management complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods that aggregate history data collected via embedded historians with additional data that is supplied by third parties. Triggering events can be defined for initiating aggregation of such history data with additional data, which enable a process/application to retrieve the operational metric data of the industrial unit/entity from any of a plurality of systems operatively coupled to such industrial unit/entity.