You might have wondered when we started
to be able to record meter data with
Smart Meters, why is that not everywhere all of the
time? Well, there is a couple problems and we'll be talking
about that with the flow of meter usage data and OSISoft's
AMI solution -- getting 0's and 1's from point A to point B.
Now the problem is that we
have meters, but we have a lot of them. We have
millions of meters, and they are reporting data every 15
minutes. Maybe 15 or 50 points of data. So that's a lot of
1's and 0's that need to cross a large geographic
region and then make it
to billing or to graphs from ProcessBook or
from PI CoreSight.
Now in this video, we won't be talking about billing much so we'll just
erase that part. Alright, 1's and
0's and they start at the data source. And then they'll go to the
PI interface. And then finally they'll get to the PI Server which
will store them forever. The PI AF Server is also
present but we won't talk about it too much in this
video. To start with
the PI Server and then we have the PI
interface and the data source. The PI Server
has an archive on it. This archive stores all of the
data. All of that meter usage data, all of those 1's and 0's forever,
stored in the archive.
Next, the PI
interface, that's PI SCC or PI Smart Container
Connector. That's going to handle this
whole torrent of data. But before we get there, we are
going to talk a little about what happens when you install
PI SCC. So when we install PI SCC, there are a couple of
configuration CSV's that need to be sent to the
PI Server. These contain
digital states so that the PI Server can interpret
the data that is being sent to it. Things like, this
meter is off. Or this meter is in error. Or this data is overheated.
If there is any states like that that
the data source needs to send to the PI Server, it's going to be
contained in these CSV files. So upon installation
of PI SCC, these are going to be imported
to the Pi Server. Another task of the installation
is MDAPut.exe
which allows you to test the connection between
the PI interface and the PI Server. What it
will do is it'll just create a test tag and write to that tag to make sure
that the PI interface has all of the proper permissions that it needs.
But we just need to do that
at installation. The actual movement of data, that's the exciting
part and that's what we are going to do right now.
OK, so to review,
PI SCC has meters.table --
this is the central master table that keeps track of all
of the PI points and where all the data needs to go.
So next to that, there are a few DLL's
that contain smoe functions that are necessary for
PI SCC to do what it needs to do. The first of these
are OSISoft.PI.Data and OSISoft.PI.Net.Dll
These contain the functions for managed
data access or MDA. That's how PI sends its
data at a very high rate. Then there is
OSISoft.PI.Configuration.DLL -- That's a specialized
buffer that's able to handle the large amount of
data that is coming from all of these
meters. OK, the head end software and this could be
different types of software that we plug into, will
collect the 1's and 0's, send it over to PI SCC,
it will find out which PI tag it needs to
send it to, and then we'll send it through MDA
and through the buffer to the PI Server. Now once it gets to the
PI Server, it'll do the standard PI
system process where it goes to the snapshot table, and
then the event queue, and then it gets written into the archive.
One important note about this is no exception or
compression is applied. None at all.
Just make sure that every meter data point
has a point every time we configured a meter read.
And we also know if we had missing data for instance.
OK, and then the last
step is this data is made available to graphs through PI ProcessBook
or PI CoreSight, or to billing through the enterprise gateway.