When using PI ProcessBook displays
often users will want to have a single uniform view that
they can use to understand multiple similar assets
or processes. I have a PI ProcessBook
display here monitoring vital information for my mixing tank 1.
But I have other tanks in my plant
that have similar process data points, points like
flow rates and products. In PI ProcessBook
you can build a display that will change
the data it is presenting based on which
asset or process you are interested in. Once
configured in this way you can flip through those
elements and your display will update depending on what you have
selected. These displays are
called element relative displays and can save a lot of
time by scaling a single display up to
an unlimited amount of assets or processes. As
well as ensuring that you are always analyzing or
viewing all of these similar displays in a uniform
way. Let's go to my mixing tank 1 display
that I made in another video. If I was to make
another mixing tank 2 and my 2
storage tank displays to copy this one, it might take
a lot of time. But in this video we'll be converting
my mixing tank 1 display into a element
relative display. So we can quickly switch through all the tanks in
my plant. Because element relative
displays require that all of your elements have a uniform
set of attributes, the first thing to do is
to inspect your asset framework for all those attributes.
So let's view the AF browser and we
can see here my AF structure has a
production area, two production lines
and then my four tanks underneath
them. And viewing the
AF properties after rearranging these windows a
little
bit, we can cycle through our
tanks and see our properties update.
So for instance we can see mixing tank 2
has all of the same attributes as storage tank 2.
And that's because we know they are all built off of the
same template as shown by this little green
t here.
So we can
close these now and start converting
our values into element relative values.
So to make any changes we'll open up
build mode
and double clicking on the first value we pull up the defined value
window. And what we'll do is pull this pull down menu
down and choose the element relative search
option.
Now eventually I'll choose an attribute
of my element. But first I need to
chose an example element to base that attribute off of. So I
can choose to search for that element by using a
root where I can select it in the
AF browser. And choose to search by
sub elements or not. And I can also search
by name or any other filters
here. What I'm going to do is have a wildcard
for a name and then search for
anything with a generic tank template.
This is a convenient way to search because
anything with my generic tank template is almost guaranteed to have the
same attributes. Now searching
we'll select our 4
tanks and hit OK.
Now we'll choose our attribute of this
example element to add to the selected attributes field
down here. So we'll select
diameter for our first value.
Click the down arrow to send it to the selected attribute
field. And then hit OK.
We can see here our configuration string takes the
form e.diameter which is short for element
relatives diameter attribute.
So we
see that it didn't change when I hit OK.
But if I view my element relative display
properties we can see
because I have mixing tank 1 selected anyways. Clicking on
storage tank 1, we'll change the
diameter to a new value reflecting storage
tank 1's diameter.
So what we can do now is change the
rest of the values in our display to accommodate
the element relative feature. So next we'll do
height. Remember double click,
pull down element relative. And this
time we already have storage tank 1 here in our element of
interest. So we can simply select
the height attribute. And hit
OK. And this time it's element
relative's height. So we'll hit OK.
Next we'll do product in the same way.
And all of these are taking the
element relative.attribute
form. So I'm going to manually type this in for the next
couple to save some time. E.volume.
This one will be
my mixer.
Here will be my flow rate in.
This is my flow rate out.
And
the last two are my trend and my
bar graph. These are going to be a similar process
with this pull down and then element
relative. Now my bar graph is mimicking
my level. So we'll add
that.
Next we'll do the trend. So double
clicking, let's clear the current points in the plot.
And search for
element relative
attributes. Here I'll use the
pressure
and internal
temperature. Those trends can accommodate multiple data
sources, I'm going to use the pressure attribute and then
also add the internal temperature
attribute at the same time. So we'll
hit OK, OK. Now flipping through we can
see all of my values update based on the elements that I have selected.
The last thing I'll do is
change my title to reflect the current
element I've selected. And I have some multi state
symbols here that also need to be changed.
So we'll move our title out of the
way and we'll add a value.
Here in the element relative
search, the element name actually isn't here in the attribute
field. I have to click this button,
especially made to add the elements name to my selected
attribute window. And we'll hit OK.
And OK again.
And I didn't outright delete this label because I
wanted to use my format painter to change my
new value quickly. And we'll move it into
place and then we can delete that.
So now the title is changing when I select my
element. And finally we'll do
our multi state symbols.
So much like the data definitions,
we'll edit the multi state and then change our
field here.
So this one is using the mixer
value.
I double clicked but you can use this button
too. And this was also using
my mixer value.
And this was using
level.
So I can use e.level for
that. So now flipping
through my different mixing
tanks, not only does my title change, but if
I scroll back in time to a point
where for example storage tank 2 had a value above
9, we can see that my
multi state symbol is working as
well. So here
I'll point out that we could've made all of this from scratch
and didn't have to first go through an existing single tank
display. And in this video in a
handful of minutes, we've changed all of our mixing tank
1 display values into element relative values.
And in doing so, we scaled a simple ProcessBook
display up to a potentially unlimited amount of
elements as long as they use a common set of process
data as defined in our PI Asset Framework database.
In a later video we'll be
covering even more ways that an AF structure can help us
view and build new displays.