The PI Integrator for Esri
ArcGIS is the product that allows you to bring your
PI System data into the Esri ArcGIS platform.
This PI System data can include
meta data and real-time data. Like for this
locomotive here.. With the PI Integrator
for Esri ArcGIS, you can now look at these
assets on a map showing their current position
and other information all updating in real-time.
Then with the Esri ArcGIS platform,
you can further create very dynamic
data intensive maps with all of your assets and
important context, and even conduct location based analytics.
In this video, we'll identify
each software component used to link
these two systems to make this happen. And we'll
draw an architecture map, walking through each step in the
data flow. Let's start off with the end
result. Realtime data on the Esri
ArcGIS client. When we are talking about
maps, individual items on the map, these are considered
features. A feature could be a stationary
well, moving locomotive, lake,
transmission line, a pipeline,
even things like a weather front. These are all features on a map.
The way Esri clients work is
they load feature services and their feature
layers onto the map. A feature layer is a
collection of like features and how that data should be presented.
For example, all of these
green dots in this region, these are locomotives in
this region. And they were added to the map as a feature
layer. Related feature layers can be
grouped under the same feature service.
In our integration, a feature
layer is a collection of AF elements
based off of the same AF element template.
These feature services are
managed and shared in the Esri ArcGIS platform
through the on premises
Esri ArcGIS for Server or
through the cloud with Esri ArcGIS
Online. In order to provide
realtime data to the assets on the map,
you can see that we need to be able to update
these feature services. To do this, we need to
have the Esri ArcGIS Geo Event Processor.
And Esri will be changing the
name of this in the next
release to the ArcGIS Geo Event
Extension for Server. This component is an
add-on which enables you to send realtime data to the
feature service. It also allows you to
do processing, filtering of data, geo
fencing. But in our integration, the Geo Event
Processor powers the real-time updates, sending
data from the PI System to the feature services.
The main story within
the Geo Event Processor is there are these
Geo Event Services. Each data stream has its own
unique Geo Event Service which will map
up specific data in the PI System to the
Esri ArcGIS platform. To do this,
there is an output and this output
is updating the target feature
service. And there is also an input that
polls our integrator. In our setup,
the data will go directly through the
service from the input to the output without changing.
But there are use cases where filtering and processing
could be done here on the Geo Event Processor.
Now how does the Geo
Event Processor get the PI System data?
And how do these services and layers get
created? This is where the PI Integrator for
Esri ArcGIS comes into the picture.
It has two major components,
the data relay service and the configuration
portal. The configuration portal is the
web server component which is used to
define the map layers and services which will expose the
PI assets and data to the Esri platform.
After that, it also functions as
the data server.
The configuration portal has a wizard and this
wizard connects to the ArcGIS platform
and by default it will create a feature
service and layer in our ArcGIS as well as
the corresponding Geo Event input
service and output to forward the data
through the system. This basic data
flow is created automatically through the wizard.
But remember the Geo Event Processor allows for
more complex and significant use cases.
And these can be accomplished by creating these
items manually instead.
The wizard is not just for
ArcGIS online. It also works with the Portal
for ArcGIS, the extension to Esri
ArcGIS for Server.
And this allows for the creation of the feature
services and layers. If you don't have the Portal for
ArcGIS and you are using Esri
ArcGIS for Server, you cannot use the
wizard to create these feature services and layers. So you'd have to
create them manually. These items on the Geo
Event Processor however can still be created through the wizard.
Going back to the
data flow through the system, the Geo
Event Processor input pulls the configuration
portal over a specific http end point.
The portal requests
values from the data relay
service and the data relay service monitors the PI
System updates, makes calls for the
data, which it passes back to the configuration portal.
In a production environment, the data
relay and the configuration portal should be installed on
separate machines. Since the data
relay needs its own machine due to the resources
for the calls that it is making. All the
security on the PI side is Windows based.
So make sure that these machines are
on trusted domains. One other
item to note is that all the http connections
an all be secured as https.
So to summarize,
when a user loads
a feature layer onto the Esri ArcGIS
client map, this feature layer is updated in
realtime by data sent from the ArcGIS
Geo Event Processor which is polling the
http end point of the PI Integrator for
Esri ArcGIS.
All these pieces working together, bring your
PI System data into the Esri ArcGIS platform.