you want to take advantage of all the
great things you've heard you can
accomplish with AF but want to make sure
you get started on the right path our
building block to accomplish this is the
element and how you set them up in a
hierarchy depends on what you want to
get out of AF an element can be a
physical piece of equipment a part of a
piece of equipment a site or even a
business unit but you choose building
blocks based on items you want to
compare and they often our logical
physical representations of an asset
elements contain attributes they're the
properties associated with an element
they can hold static data or be
references to PI points formulas or
results of calculations it's basically
anything that's important about the
element how you arrange elements into a
logical hierarchy depends on the
comparisons that you want to make which
is what we're going to focus on in this
video let's take a look at two examples
we'll start by building just a few
elements for a wind farm to show you how
to get started then we'll discuss a more
complex completed hierarchy for a power
plant so let's start with the wind farm
example my wind farm company has two
sites each with multiple turbines first
both sites should be in the same AF
database since we want to be able to
compare across sites it's difficult to
compare elements that are in different
databases if we build a flat hierarchy
it will be difficult to compare overall
performance of each site instead create
sites as elements with turbines under
each of those sites at the site level we
can complete a rollup analysis to
aggregate information about each site
and then we'll be able to compare site 1
to site 2 we won't cover how to do this
here but a lot of the heavy lifting is
done with templates you only need to
create your site or turbine element once
and then use the power of templates to
build out your AF structure this
standardized what it means to be a site
or what it means to be a turbine or
anything for that matter and if you
decide to change the template later it
propagates to all the assets made from
that template check out the advanced
topics
f playlist to learn more about templates
you can also head over to the advanced
playlist to learn about reference types
which define the relationships between
elements at different levels of your
hierarchy let's start by building a site
element and a turbine element in PI
system Explorer here we have an empty AF
database right click on elements and
create a new element we haven't created
any element templates yet so we'll
select none here and I'll call this site
1 on the general tab and go ahead and
check it in right click on site 1 and
create a new child element under site
one using the parent-child relationship
again selecting an element template none
click OK and we'll rename this turbine 1
and go ahead and check it in the
attributes tab is where we define
specific information about our elements
depending on which element we have
selected in this case we would like to
add some attributes for our turbine and
the turbine element is the one I
currently have selected click on the
attributes tab and select new attribute
I'd like to add information about the
manufacturer so I'm going to change the
name to manufacturer and type in its
value here since it's a static attribute
I'd also like to include some sort of
link between turbine one and a PI tag
that holds information about its bearing
temperature to do that I'll right-click
and say new attribute and rename this
attribute bearing temperature there are
a lot of different ways to link
information that isn't static two
attributes and we'll discuss that in the
following video on data reference types
however as a simple example I would like
to link this to a PI tag and this is
known as a PI point data reference data
references that are defined here and you
can see a list of all of the different
reference types that are available just
as an example we're gonna do PI point
data reference I'll select PI point and
here you see a message that attributes
with data references are not typically
marked as configuration items so I'm
going to uncheck that here under data
reference I'll again go to PI point data
reference click settings and then search
for my tag and you can see it here and
now you can see that the attribute
bearing temperature is linked to a PI
tag which has a current value of 24
point five in this timestamp
we want to get to what we currently have
on the Left which is one site and one
turbine to a structure with sites and
multiple turbines but we don't want to
build each one manually the steps we
would complete are to finish building
the site and turbine elements that we
have on the left this would be adding
the rest of the attributes for your
turbine these would be multiple data
reference types which will be discussed
in the following video or including
calculations with expression analysis
with asset analytics which you can check
out another playlist you may also want
at the site level to include a rollup
analysis which would be on a rollup
analysis with asset analytics and if you
forget anything you can always add it to
the template later we would then convert
site 1 and turbine 1 to templates and
then we would finish building out the
rest of our AF hierarchy using those
templates
and that's completed using templates in
AF which is in the advanced playlist
let's take a look at a second more
complex example of a power plant and you
can see here that the power plant is
made up of two units inside of each unit
there are multiple components in this
case a boiler a condenser etc and each
boiler is composed of an air heater a
reheater and a super heater and if you
click on boiler for instance there are
many attributes associated with the
boiler as well as the air heater the
reheater and super heater let's discuss
why you might want to create your
hierarchy this way with this hierarchy
we can some of the energy usage of the
air heater reheater and super heater at
the boiler level and this is
accomplished using the analysis service
this is possible because we built a
hierarchy to support this we would then
be able to compare the boiler efficiency
for unit 1 to the boiler efficiency of
unit 2 and this is possible because we
used element templates this should
provide you with more ideas about how
you would want to create your hierarchy
to be able to do the comparisons that
you want the assets that we wanted to
compare defined our hierarchy while
templates will provide us with the
standardization required to make those
comparisons to learn more about how to
get started with templates see the
advanced AF playlist