Process Historians :

Key Points :

 A Data Historian (also known as a Process Historian or Operational Historian)

 software program that records and retrieves production and process data by time
 stores the information in a time series database
 that can efficiently store data with minimal disk space and fast retrieval
 Time series information is often displayed in a trend or as tabular data over a time
range (ex. the last day, last 8 hours, last year).
 a Data Historian in different industries:

 Manufacturing site to record instrument readings

o Process (ex. flow rate, valve position, vessel level, temperature, pressure)
o Production Status (ex. machine up/down, downtime reason tracking)
o Performance Monitoring (ex. units/hour, machine utilization vs. machine
capacity, scheduled vs. unscheduled outages)
o Product Genealogy (ex. start/end times, material consumption quantity,
lot # tracking, product setpoints and actual values)
o Quality Control (ex. quality readings inline or offline in a lab for
compliance to specifications)
o Manufacturing Costing (ex. machine and material costs assignable to a
production)
 Utilities (ex. Coal, Hydro, Nucleur, and Wind power plants, transmission, and
distribution)
 Data Center to record device performance about the server environment (ex.
resource utilization, temperatures, fan speeds), the network infrastructure (ex.
router throughput, port status, bandwidth accounting), and applications (ex.
health, execution statistics, resource consumption).
 Heavy Equipment monitoring (ex. recording of run hours, instrument and
equipment readings for predictive maintenance)
 Racing (ex. environmental and equipment readings for Sail boats, race cars)
 Environmental monitoring (ex. weather, sea level, atmospheric conditions,
ground water contamination)


What can you record in a Data Historian?

 it will record data over time from one or more locations
 one chooses to analyze a valve, tank level, fan temperature, or even a network
bandwidth,
 the user can evaluate its operation, efficiency, profitability, and setbacks of production.
  It can record integers (whole numbers), real numbers (floating point with a fraction),
bits (on or off), strings (ex. product name), or a selected item from a finite list of values
(ex. Off, Low, High).
 Some examples of what might be recorded in a data historian include:

Analog Readings: temperature, pressure, flowrates, levels, weights, CPU

temperature, mixer speed, fan speed

Digital Readings: valves, limit switches, motors on/off, discrete level sensors

Product Info: product id, batch id, material id, raw material lot id

Quality Info: process and product limits, custom limits

Alarm Info: out of limits signals, return to normal signals

Aggregate data: average, standard deviation, cpk, moving average

Collects data from heterogeneous sources

into a common platform for analysis