Wonderware s New ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure for Streamlining Application Development, Life Cycles

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1 Wonderware s New ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure for Streamlining Application Development, Life Cycles

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3 The pace of change is accelerating at Internet warp speed, which makes it more difficult for manufacturers to stay competitive. Development of production automation projects cannot keep pace with the Internet, which creates problems for producers of hard goods and commodities. Product life cycles are growing shorter, yet they now are more complex because they include many more functional versions during the product s lifetime. New or enhanced products must be brought to market far more quickly or they risk being obsolete. And products must satisfy a larger global audience in order to serve an economically efficient market, so they must be capable of quick yet high quality internationalization. What do these changes mean for application developers? It s imperative that project development must be as short as possible. It must also permit continuous improvements throughout the project life cycle. Indeed, products and projects now need to be evolutionary over a lifetime, rather than revolutionary and with discontinuous enhancements. But how does an application developer particularly a creator of industrial automation applications deliver finished projects in much shorter time frames, with custom tailored functionality for different users? By taking advantage of new developments in operating system infrastructure that allow the use of modular, reusable component objects instead of recreating services that are common to individual automation applications. Wonderware has spent the past five years developing just such a powerful framework and operating environment for industrial applications (see Figure 1). The company long ago recognized the need to enable different application components to run seamlessly on top of a common infrastructure. The primary benefit of this new framework is that, for the first time, it allows application developers to concentrate on making the best use of their domain expertise, rather than consuming time and effort on the underlying plumbing. Metals Automotive Food Oil/Gas Pipelines Process Units Domain Objects Scada Phases Data Access Servers Industrial Automation Infa-Structure Figure 1. The Archestra Framework ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure 3

4 This new technology is called ArchestrA a combination of the words architecture and orchestra and it comes to market as a new set of common infrastructure services rather than an off-the-shelf product. It s a new technology that brings many benefits to industrial automation developers from OEMs to value-added resellers (VARs) and to end users. The ArchestrA Framework Wonderware s new ArchestrA infrastructure consists of the primary functional services that are needed to build products for an industrial automation application. It s intended to abstract users from the complexities of the underlying technologies so that they only need assembly skills, not sophisticated programming skills, and can concentrate instead on satisfying domain requirements with which they re already familiar. By building these common application requirements into the framework, users need not be concerned with their design or implementation when configuring any OEM product or end user system. This entire framework resides on top of the foundation enabling technologies provided by Microsoft with its operating system and associated enabling software. ArchestrA has been designed specifically to provide a framework of common infrastructure technology that is deployed in all automation applications. Providing built in services such as: Design and development environment Deployment Services Powerful scripting and calculation services Alarm and Event subsystem, for management, delivery, printing, and historization services for alarm and events Powerful built in historization and guaranteed delivery services Built in distributed architecture services for scaleability Integration with and data acquisition from all types of field devices Inter-object communications and name service management services Version management services Security Model services Centralized license management and deployment services Centralized system diagnostics and system administration services Internationalization of objects and application services Graphical/UI editing services, with multiple runtime rendering services Reporting and Query services Common support for industry standards such as OPC and SQL This extensive list of infrastructure features portends a vast difference in how engineers will develop automation applications in the future. They will be able to use a plant-centric, component model architecture for system design riding on top of the Windows platform and the ArchestrA framework which will let them reuse engineering from project to project, often using as much as 70% of the engineering developed for previous projects. (see Wonderware White Paper #, on Component Architecture Model) 4 ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure

5 ArchestrA Features & Benefits On a practical basis, ArchestrA provides new capabilities for application visualization and monitoring. The user interface accommodates real-time view stations for the control room workstation as well as lite view stations that run anywhere in browsers. This provides a new generation of graphic development and management across the multiple formats of user interfaces required in today s manufacturing systems, from plant floor workstations to desktop monitors and even remote handheld devices, such as PDAs. The framework s scripting functionality extends the capabilities of both the general and the power user, allowing them to easily customize applications to satisfy a particular domain requirement. The same scripting capabilities are available to all applications, regardless of who developed it. This includes the existing InTouch scripting syntax editing capabilities for migration and usability. The ArchestrA security system provides deployment, development and administration security as well as the flexibility to create a function-based security model for any application. The framework provides a scaleable security model, even across very large applications. The license model provides a centrally administered licensing system that can be deployed over the Internet. It abstracts the user from the license considerations of any individual application and provides great flexibility for diverse licensing models specific to individual OEM products. Event events and alarms are handled differently and more efficiently. The ArchestrA framework provides a distributed alarm system, both in execution and storage. It enables events to be incorporated into functions, which can trigger actions locally or remotely, and permits their distribution to enable the load balancing of functions. For handling historical or time series data, ArchestrA provides a history engine that acts as a funnel for collecting data from many areas and passing it to a history subsystem, for storing all time series data such as plant data, alarms, events, etc. This allows configuration of multiple historian subsystems in an application, which are logically viewed and accessible as one entity through a common Query Engine. To manage data reporting, the framework includes a standard facility that enables data extraction from multiple databases as if they were logically one, enabling custom report templates to be set up to generate reports automatically or manually. This approach also facilitates ad hoc queries using standard SQL statements. Maintenance and administration is simplified as well. Backup and archiving functionality aids in achieving zero administration for systems and applications. This can be a crucial factor for both end users and product developers in their defined market spaces. ArchestrA accomplishes this by providing centralized configuration of all aspects of a system through an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which facilitates concurrent development of applications as well as deployment services, change control through versioning and built-in administration facilities such as backup, load balancing and archiving. Part of Zero Administration is providing a powerful and intuitive diagnostics system that incorporates tools for locating and investigating problems, either locally or remotely. Enabling users to build administration and management systems for their application best fitting the customers requirements. ArchestrA provides these tools within its framework. As for customization, it provides a set of style templates to facilitate the seamless blending of custom user interfaces, documentation and a help file system into the final domain product. Taken together, all of these ArchestrA framework capabilities remove the complexity from automation application development. Engineers now can develop their own domain functionality as an entity unto itself and simply link it to the framework for deploying any of ArchestrA s features. As an example, consider the engineer who needs to deploy a complex service such as alarm handling. All the user need do during development of the domain application entity is define the triggers for specific alarms. The trigger will then call on the built-in alarm functionality of ArchestrA to deliver the alarm wherever it s needed at the client level, route the acknowledgement back to the domain object and provide historization of the alarm and response. This new approach abstracts the user from having to design complex tasks for each application entity which results in more rapid application development and easier change management during the project life cycle. ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure 5

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8 2001 Wonderware Canada Corporation. All rights reserved. Wonderware, FactorySuite, InTouch and Avantis are registered trademarks of Wonderware Corporation. ActiveFactory, ArchestrA, FactoryOffice, InTrack, InControl, InBatch, IndustrialSQL Server, MaintenanceSuite, QI Analyst, SCADAlarm, SuiteVoyager and Web Server are trademarks of Wonderware Corporation. Microsoft and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 100 Technology Dr. Irvine, CA Tel: (949) Fax: (949) Wonderware s New ArchestrA Industrial Framework Provides Infrastructure for Streamlining Application Development, Life Cycles First Printing June 2001