Seeq’s Goal Is to Help DeltaV Users Maximize Their Investment
This week we are back on the road as our fall tour of automation vendor user conferences continues. We hope to see you if you are attending Emerson Exchange in Austin, Texas. We will be showcasing Seeq integration with the DeltaV Continuous Historian as well as integration with other products from Emerson.
We are particularly encouraged by customer feedback on Seeq integration with the DeltaV Distributed Control System. The DeltaV DCS offers a range of functionality including process control, batch management, alarm analysis, operator logbooks, and analytics. And each of these DeltaV capabilities includes analytics applications to view and analyze data.
With Seeq, however, there is the opportunity to integrate and analyze these DeltaV data types in a single interface with a shared set of visual, interactive application features. Seeq provides data connectors to all the DeltaV data sources to overlay, interact with, and perform analytics from a single screen in your web browser.
The Seeq approach to working with DeltaV data is an alternative to what we find most users doing, which is exporting their data from the disparate data sources into Excel. Although this works in theory, it usually is an intractable time-consuming process as described in my previous blog post. So rather than go that route, DeltaV users can use Seeq to connect to their data and get insight much faster.
For example, the DeltaV user shown in the picture below is running a batch process and has an OSIsoft PI historian. The question posed to the process engineer here is “How can I reduce the cycle time of my filtration flux?” Seeq offers a way to benchmark the current cycle time with a few clicks by simultaneously pulling from both process and batch data.
The trend line at the bottom is the result showing the cycle time for the filtration flux. It was calculated based on the duration of the ramp-up times of the receiving vessel while the “Filtration Phase Class” was ‘Running.’ Figuring out the cycle time based strictly on the time the unit phase “Running” or the receiving vessel was ramping would not give good results – each data source is incomplete on its own. However, combining these time periods – process data with batch context – focuses in on the proper filtration flux times. The result is a nice benchmarking trend for cycle times at the bottom of the chart.
Seeq accomplishes this by connecting to DeltaV and other data sources and pulling in data as needed. Seeq’s data connector repertoire includes OSIsoft PI, DeltaV Continuous Historian, and now Microsoft SQL Server (and MySQL, and CSV files). Since the DeltaV Batch Historian is stored in a SQL database, Seeq can query it directly and bring in batch context in the form of capsules. Now your batches can seamlessly be used alongside the rest of your Seeq analysis. Here is a batch overlay using Seeq’s Capsule Time. For more information on capsules, see this blog post.
Capsule Time gives the user an intuitive visual to compare signals and see outliers and opportunities for process improvement. For this example, the multiple filtration flux runs are overlaid with the receiving vessel level is shown.
There are many more opportunities to combine your DeltaV data sources to get insight. DeltaV Logbooks uses a SQL database so you can bring shift information, task durations, and flag counts to get more insight into your operations. For users of DeltaV Batch Analytics, Seeq’s regression and signal processing formulas can help inform you of the best stages to build your predictive batch models. Alarm and Event data can be viewed as Seeq’s capsules and investigated with all your other data. Even if you have some offline data sitting in a text file that you want to bring into your analysis, you can do that by using Seeq’s CSV file connector. This is helpful when bringing in data from external measurement and analytics devices. The possibilities are endless.
DeltaV’s functionality continues to expand to provide additional process control, batch management, and manufacturing solutions. Seeq’s goal is to help DeltaV users maximize their investment by providing insight into their process by bringing in all their data into a single application – or better yet, same screen. By doing so, DeltaV’s process experts are empowered to experiment with their data, moving at the speed of their thought, to solve their toughest analytics problems.