Patrick Bonk
Since we released Info360 Plant last year, our product and development teams have been pushing out regular updates. As more and more customers adopt it, we are listening closely to their feedback. Based on their needs – and some new functionality we’ve enabled across the Info360 suite of apps – we’ve added some exciting features for Global Launch, the time when Autodesk pushes out their biggest updates of the year: analytic template libraries, enhancements to the platform’s configurability, and integration with more databases.
Analytics Template Libraries
Analytic templates provide a foundation for users to work with, allowing them to make specific changes and adjustments based on their individual system and analysis needs.
You can now create customizable templates for simple analytic processes – or even more complex custom analytics that incorporate multiple data streams. These analytic templates have been designed to help automate workflows and optimize plant processes, and our new template libraries make it easy for you to distribute and share permission-based insights with internal teams or Engineering Service Providers (ESPs), streamlining data sharing and increasing collaboration.
Compliance-ready data export tools
The compliance-ready data export tools and reports feature of Info360 Plant applies real-time data analytics to incoming data streams, eliminating the need for manual processing and analysis, helping you streamline your compliance reporting and reducing time and effort. And now, you can automatically export compliant data and reports from multiple sources, including SCADA, LIMS, Billing, and IoT.
Pump performance analytic enhancements
We have improved our pump performance workflows with enhanced data exploration tools to allow you to view all data at all intervals at any time range.
The pump performance toolset in Info360 Plant also now supports booster pumps, allowing you to assess performance relative to manufacturer specifications. You can configure input suction pressures and add fixed corrections for physical offsets of pump sensors.
The Pump Performance chart now allows you to visualize all major pump performance metrics:
- Observed Flow vs Pressure
- Manufacturer specs for Flow vs Pressure
- Observed Flow vs Energy
- Manufacturer specs for Flow vs Energy
- Manufacturer specs for Flow vs Efficiency
OPC-UA Connection for SCADA platform integration
The Info360 Plant data connector now supports the OPC-UA protocol and direct interfacing with OSI PI historians, simplifying the integration and configuration with existing SCADA systems data historians and reducing the time for deployment and value for users accessing data from multiple data sources.
By adding more database support, including SQL, Oracle, MySQL, OSI Pi, and now OPC-UA, we know we can make it easier for our customers to get the most out of the data they collect – in the format that they collect it.
Connecting to ArcGIS Online
ArcGIS Online’s interactive web mapping tools have become indispensable to many water professionals. Now you can connect to ArcGIS Online and bring spatial layers, asset geometry, and information into Info360 Plant and integrate your ArcGIS Online geospatial data with our analysis and visualisation tools.
Admin users can quickly and securely set up the integration by providing their ArcGIS user credentials. Once set up, this direct connection to ArcGIS Online eliminates the need for data duplication or exporting, helping you improve your data accuracy and preventing errors in data management.
In a future release, we plan to implement the reverse process, giving you the ability to publish content from Info360 applications to ArcGIS Online.
Added statistical functions to analytics
Info360 Plant has added several new templates and analytics, which are available in the Analytics section under Tools. You can create new analytics and templates from the pre-configured insights around energy management and coagulation optimization.
Additional statistic functions have also been added, including improved error handling to enable easier troubleshooting when validating analytics and moving Rate Of Change calculations to incorporate a user-defined number of Previous data points.
- Rate of Change: Provides a moving rate of change for time series data. Each data point in the rate of change result is the rate of change at that given time for the given period (number of data points previous).
- Previous: Allows you to pull data from the past to the current time. Useful when comparing current information to 24 hours ago, or one week ago, or one month ago.
We’ve also improved error handling for easier troubleshooting if your analytics generate an error message when computing.
Those are the major updates, and we’ll keep bringing you more as Info360 Plant keeps evolving. You can stay updated on what’s coming next by following along with our public roadmap.
Special thanks to Technical Marketing Manager Youssef Al Fahham and Product Manager Javier Cantu for their help in compiling this update.