Turning data into information

By their very nature process control systems have to acquire data from the plant. In simple terms, if you can't measure it, you can't control it. But to get the most out of your plant databases, the information needs accessing across the business, not just at the control level. According to Tony Prylowski of Automsoft International, `there are very few products available that link process information management with process control.'

Prylowski set up Automsoft in Dublin in 1997 precisely to provide that link. The result is the Rapid (real-time access plant information database) historian. Like other historians, Rapid sits above the distributed control system level, with client applications able to interrogate the plant data collected from the DCS. Where it differs from others, however, is in its object-oriented database structure.

Competing products, in Automsoft's view, work by grafting a real-time extension on to a conventional, commercial relational database, whose performance actually decreases as its size increases. Rapid, on the other hand, has been developed `from the ground up' as a real-time object-oriented system. This means that any changes to the plant or process, and its measurement and control system, do not need major modifications to the database. And users can configure the historian themselves to suit changing requirements without needing any programming knowledge.

On the plant side, Rapid lives up to its name with a capability of acquiring up to 25 000 events per second from up to one million tags, and importing the data to its 64 terabytes of storage. On the business side, enterprise-level applications such as planning, scheduling and reporting can extract data directly from the database.

One of the difficulties in the past of achieving this `plant to boardroom' integration has been the proprietary nature of so much control and, to a lesser extent, business software. To overcome this hurdle, Rapid runs on industry standard Windows NT4 servers and Windows NT4/95 clients. Again at the plant level, it complies with de facto standards such as OPC (see panel), while at the business end of operations it supports the likes of SQL, ODBC and ActiveX, offering connectivity to systems such as SAP.

Acting as an OPC client for data access, Rapid can connect to and take data from any OPC-compliant server on a network - whether it's a Scada system, DCS or PLC. Managers can then access this information on their desktop PCs, pulling it directly into standard office applications. Plant operators can also access the database directly, through the facility to embed the Rapid ActiveX client on the screen of any ActiveX Scada system. PE