Introduction

The OSIsoft Plant Information data historian has been used to collect time-series data from the oil and gas, power, water and other utility sectors since the 1980s.

In the mid-2000s OSIsoft added Asset Framework, a method of implementing asset relative modelling to the flat, non-hierarchical PI point database.

Given this online historical source of process data, users would like to be able to utilise not only point-related near real-time data but also interact with the modelled view of their infrastructure in PTC ThingWorx.

What is the PI Data Archive?

The PI Data Archive is a component of the PI Server that provides efficient storage of time series data into proprietary archive files, enabling high performance data retrieval by client software. Since this is the foundation for the PI System, all customers will have and use this component.

What is PI AF?

PI Asset Framework (PI AF) is a single repository for asset-centric models, hierarchies, objects, and equipment (hereafter referred to as elements). It integrates, contextualizes, refines, references, and further analyses data from multiple sources including one or more PI Data Archives and non-PI sources such as external relational databases. Together these metadata and time series data provide a detailed description of equipment or assets.

PI AF allows the user to apply a logical hierarchy, and create elements based on real world assets. These elements map attributes to PI points and other data sources, apply basic calculation analyses and trigger the recording of condition-driven events.

What is PTC Thingworx?

PTC ThingWorx is an IIoT platform designed for rapidly developing industrial IoT solutions, with the ability to scale securely from the cloud to the edge. Built for end-to-end solutions it offers a number of complementary capabilities and provides businesses with the option of purchasing or creating specific applications around their industrial processes, control and automation.

How does the Connector work?

The connector is used to connect the OSISoft PI Data Archive and PI AF to a ThingWorx instance, allowing the user to not only view the existing logical hierarchy but also to retrieve time series data sets, to look at historical tag data in the historian and to present that information in a mashup. There are also services available to retrieve historical data, subscribe to real time updates of the Data Archive, and query the historical data of attributes defined within elements. 

The installer includes the connector service as well as sample mashups to show the data being collected. There are also services that support the creation of Thing Templates, Things and Networks based on the OSISoft Asset Framework Model.

The connector consists of:

• A service that needs to be installed on the same Windows based computer as the PI AF-SDK.

• A Thing Template designed to interface with that service.

• Supporting mashups to showcase how the connector is used.

• Other ThingWorx entities are also included like styles, datashapes, etc.

The Connector gets the PI data via AFSearch objects or AFDataPipes and then packages up the PI data into a Thingworx information table and passes it in to Thingworx via the AlwaysOn protocol to pass the data.