The Building PI System Assets and Analytics with Asset Framework (AF) class provides a working knowledge of the power of the AF Server, an integral part of the PI System.

You will learn how to define consistent representations of organizational assets and/or equipment and use these representations in simple or complex analyses that produce critical, actionable information. AF allows an application designer to identify and customize the components or elements that make up a process, associate real-time, relational or calculated data with these elements, specify the organizational structure through hierarchies or connectivity relationships, and apply calculations or rules against these assets and determine how the results should be displayed.

In this class we will discuss and build basic AF elements and attributes, build calculations and set up relational database queries. In a simulated environment, Asset Analytics is used to calculate metric data for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). We see how Event Frames are applied to monitor the production process for downtime situations and for process excursions. We explore the visualization of information with different PI Visualization Suite products. In the advanced exercises we discuss the combination of the various elements to provide users with complex information structures. We will build connections to relational databases and use that information in visualizations and analysis.

Notifications, which allow users to configure custom alarms through a standard user interface based on any data source, will also be covered in detail. Leveraging AF’s generic data access and template-based capabilities, users can redistribute alarm parameters in Notifications to similar assets across the enterprise. When operational deviations occur, Notifications can send alerts to a single recipient, a group of contacts, or an escalation team reflecting the organization’s chain of command.