The ArchestrAnaut

IAS is as flexible as or more flexible than any other platform out on the market in terms of the breadth of programming possibilities. The concept of inheritance makes it possible to make changes at a template level and all of its children (templates & instances) will be changed too. Equally as powerful is IAS’s inclusion of .NET in their QuickScript language.

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Andy & I have always been fairly frustrated with the Wonderware Alarm Logger service.  It almost seems like an afterthought for System Platform (just look at the service name:  New_AlarmLogger).  Perhaps the most frustrating part is trying to integrate it into a system with redundant App Servers.  To the developers:  please integrate this into the System Platform in a future release.

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So I’m working on migrating some modules from 3.0 SP2 to 3.1 SP2 Patch 01.   When I went to look at a built-in Active Factory trend I noticed a couple field parameters weren’t trending.  Curious. I check out my configuration and sure enough the field parameters in question weren’t historized.

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I had fully intended to write up daily summaries from Ops Manage but I’m not quite that industrious. So instead here are some quick bits I picked up along the way.

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Unbeknownst to me a member of the press happened to find my presentation on challenges in a greenfield parenteral filling facility interesting enough to write up.

http://www.automationworld.com/feature-7744

Ok, the picture isn’t great but if you can get past that it gives a nice summary of the talk.

- Andy

It was quite the first real day at Ops Manage.  As always it started off with a large group session talking about big issues and bigger ideas.

A few of the more notable items from the talk

Everyone’s talking about the cloud and Invensys is no different.  There was a very interesting proof of concept showing something they are calling "Archestra Global Storage".  The big idea is that you have a centralized, cloud-based, repository for all of your standards.  Then, using right clicks in the IDE you can move items to and from a local library and then manage those templates between your local library and the library hosted on Archestra Global storage.  While I’m not exactly clear why you would require a private could platform to host this, as opposed to a web service or app inside your business firewall, it was still quite interesting.

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Drove down to Orlando yesterday. We didn’t hit any 1 hour construction or wreck delays on I-95, which I’ve found to be typical during my years of traveling the corridor.

The accommodations at the Peabody are outstanding, well done on the venue selection Invensys.

This afternoon we had a dry run for the presentations in the Life Sciences Industry session.  Overall I think it went well, we’ll see how things go in the real world tomorrow.

Throughout the course of the conference I’ll be posting thoughts and reviews if you will based on what I’m seeing and hearing.

In my last article, I discussed a more reliable way of writing DataChange scripts. We often write scripts that are intended to be executed if one of multiple values change state or if a certain set of conditions occur. For the latter of the two scenarios, we write a simulated OnTrue / OnFalse script in the method described by the previous article.  Both scenarios require a composite value to execute a data comparison on.

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In my last article, I laid out the basics on the inner workings of IAS objects and pointed out a few basic pitfalls.  The most important of these is the reliability of DataChange, OnTrue, and OnFalse scripts.  In a heavily loaded system, the AppEngine can spend too much time doing housekeeping work (i.e. checkpointing or communication with its redundant partner engine).  This leads to scan overruns which can be monitored (via object viewer or historizing) the AppEngine’s Scheduler.ScanOverrunCnt variable.

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