PI AF

Business Challenge

In today's business climate, companies struggle to satisfy the growing information appetite of their data consumers-who include knowledge workers across the company, line of business managers, and executives. Most organizations own an abundance of data from many sources from which meaningful information might be extracted. However, this data is often inconsistent and can have varying definitions and names-adding considerable complexity to even simple analyses. It also becomes difficult to find and access data for users unfamiliar with the naming conventions used. In developing and deploying targeted applications that utilize this data, these companies often resort to rigid point solutions that rely upon programmatic integration techniques, which make the job of managing and maintaining these applications an expensive process. Companies must find a way to abstract and "genericize" data access so users can perform analyses efficiently without burdening their information management infrastructure

PI AF Overview

PI AF from OSIsoft^® is a flexible product that enables an organization to define a consistent representation of its assets and use these assets in simple or complex analyses that yield critical and actionable information. Through its intuitive user interface, PI AF allows an application designer to

1. Identify the components or elements that make up a process;
2. Associate data-be it real-time or relational data-with these elements;
3. Organize elements into logical/physical groups (e.g., asset templates);
4. Specify relationships or organizational structure such as hierarchical or connectivity models;
5. Apply calculations, rules, or solvers;
6. Determine how results are to be displayed.

Once defined, individual assets can be organized and regrouped, without limitations, to drive meaningful analyses and enable rich presentation of data. Because it is configuration-driven rather than programmatically-driven, PI AF allows users to accomplish all of these tasks easily and rapidly.

Technical Components

The PI System Explorer: Use this data-centric interface to manage the assets and models that have been defined within the PI AF database. For example, view your database structure, create new content, rename and configure items, or run analyses to validate that calculations are accurate.

ProcessBook Modeler: This comprehensive interface presents a visual representation of existing models and contains tools used to build and analyze models graphically. In addition, employees can access controls that facilitate case study management and analysis, and drill directly into PI AF Explorer to gain additional insight into individual models.

Microsoft Office Excel Add-in: This two-part feature enables employees to alter existing configurations and to retrieve data and connectivity information. First, employees can override template settings and redefine specific data references. Second, users can pull data from the PI AF into an Excel-based report, and maintain the context and connectivity information associated with the model.

Software Development Kit (SDK): Developers can use this rich collection of tools to tailor the PI AF to meet their organization's exact needs. In addition, PI AF contains a comprehensive user guide and programmer reference to lead developers through the programming experience.

Benefits

Enhance data comprehension by assigning context to data, making the data meaningful and relevant to information workers.

Improve data management by using a common, easy-to-navigate infrastructure for accessing data, naming assets, and defining processes that apply across your entire operation, be it a single plant or an enterprise.

Implement standards across your organization by using templates to define models, assets, processes, calculations, and more.

Gain rich business insight using the visualization tools within the RtPortal family that provides quick access to relevant information about existing process models, associated calculations, and more.

Increase profit margin by supporting business processes with a cost-effective, maintainable, dynamic toolset that yields critical and actionable information.

Intuitive data searches; assets, and models versioning

Features

Versatile data sourcing: PI AF is data agnostic and can connect through customizable data references to multiple data sources such as PI servers but also relational data.

Standardization: The building blocks of PI AF are called templates, which enforce structure and standards in organizing your data. This simplifies management and propagation of changes over time. But templates are flexible to allow for local customization.

Organization: Asset attributes can be organized hierarchically or through categories to speed up and simplify browsing and searching information. Assets themselves can also be exposed through multiple hierarchical or connectivity models to ease navigation an data retrieval.

Versioning: PI AF captures the evolution of your assets and structures over time such that your real time information is always presented in the corresponding context.

Configuration: In PI AF, calculations and rules are configured instead of programmed, lowering the bar of accessibility to the users.

Scalability: PI AF is designed to organize millions of assets, each having hundreds of properties or attributes.

INFORMATION

PI AF (Datasheet)