Asset Framework or AF has been a
staple of the PI System since 2010. What
exactly is Asset Framework? And what can we achieve with
it? At its core, Asset Framework provides a way to organize your
assets. Assets are generally thought of
as pieces of equipment like a turbine or meter. But
they can also be more abstract like an individual
building, an entire power plant or a city where you maintain
multiple facilities. Asset Framework gives you the
ability to logically map out your
technical and business operations and those are restricted to one map.
With multiple views, AF provides an intuitive way for a
maintenance engineer to find a boiler that has overheated or a plant
manager to see all the assets he is responsible
for. Digging deeper into each asset, we see how Asset
Framework provides context to your data. AF helps you
collect all of the information associated with each
asset. So all of your sensor data from your traditional PI
points is readily available along side non real-time
meta data. Items like last service time,
equipment model or manufacturer can be vital to keeping your
assets healthy. It's also easy to create tables
with your asset meta data. And AF can import
and link with tables you already maintain to
ensure that all asset meta data is kept up to date. Grouping
all asset data together creates a holistic view of your
PI System while eliminating issues with finding your
data through esoteric tag naming conventions.
OK, we organize our assets, what else can we do?
Arguably the most powerful feature
of Asset Framework is the ability to create
templates making a cookie cutter model for
repeatable assets which makes it incredibly easy to
scale. Scaling is essential while your company is adding new equipment
like a new turbine at a plant, creating another production
line, or adding an entirely new site. As you need
to easily to standardize your operations, templates will
streamline the build out of your existing or new
systems and as you get more advanced with template design, you'll be able to
create layouts that can apply to several types of equipment.
Or even model out your entire process from
start to finish.
Once you've organized your assets in an intuitive
way, it's time to get more out of your PI Points.
Explore and manipulate your data with our asset analytics engine
built into AF. Configure predictive models
to set targets for your processes, write equations to
increase your understanding or compare roll up
analysis to investigate which equipment or site
is succeeding more than the rest. Leverage your meta data to see trends that you
might not have insight into before. The possibilities are
endless and configuration is straight-forward.
Yet another addition to Asset Frameworks' suite of
features is the ability to capture events that happen throughout your
operations and notify your personnel when necessary.
Event Frames allow you to track individual shifts,
batches or process excursions while notifications can alert
an engineer prior to a failure or be used to send out a
summary report on a scheduled basis. Tracking events is
crucial to optimizing your process and will help to
identify areas to improve your product. Notifications make
sure you don't need to worry about your operations. Since PI
will be able to communicate any problems
to you and your team the second things are out of place. With
Asset Framework, you are gearing up for the full extent of the
PI System. Many of our visualization and data shaping
tools leverage Asset Framework to give you
better intuition about your data. PI Vision, PI
DataLink, PI ProcessBook and our PI Integrators rely on
AF to provide you with a simple and intuitive way to
interact with your processes. Live troubleshooting,
writing repeatable reports or sifting through
huge amounts of data becomes much simpler with Asset Framework as your backbone.
Additionally, AF provides a whole new way
for you as developers to interact with
PI. We encourage you to leverage the AF SDK to build applications
that fit your needs. Asset Framework
organizes your data and meta data, helps
you scale, analyze and track your processes, and
provides you with an intuitive window into your operations. Asset
Framework is the key to unlocking the full value of your PI
System. To learn how to best leverage the possibilities of
Asset Framework, have a look at the Asset Framework play-list below.