In today’s industrial environments, the availability and timely access to plant data are used to understand operational dependencies and assist in achieving safe and optimal production.
Advances in technology and the ongoing development of information sharing standards (and cybersecurity) have made collaboration between multiple applications, even hosted in different regions, easily achievable. The recent acceleration in Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption will harness this information in ways that we are yet to imagine.
A Look Back: Industrial Data Challenges in the 1990s
If we go back thirty years, achieving this level of data access was much more challenging. Large industrial sites were characterised by multiple disparate systems with little or no integration. Information was managed in silos, and often, centralised reporting required many manual activities.
Plant operators struggled to get all the information they needed, engineers battled with incompatible systems, and management lacked a clear view of individual and overall performance. Reporting intervals were daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, with analysis done on previous period data. As industrial processes became more automated and distributed, the complexity increased.
The Birth of Industrial Data Xchange (IDX)
The journey of Industrial Data Xchange (IDX) began with a goal to bring order to the industrial data chaos of the 1990s. The vision was to create a simple framework that allowed disparate systems to be connected into multiple software hubs that could support the routing of data into a site data historian or support advanced process control applications to read and write to the control systems in a consistent manner.
The first versions of the software preceded software standards such as classic Open Platform Communications (OPC), which is based on Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and limited to Microsoft Windows systems, and the more modern and feature-rich OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), which is available across multiple platforms.
The Development of the IDX Suite
Since 1995, this vision has led to the development of IDX Suite:
- A real-time data exchange hub to manage, store and communicate plant information in real-time.
- Several tools to model data, identify and capture events and trigger alerts.
- A Structured Query Language (SQL) server-based time-series historian.
Figure 1: From Challenge to Solution: The Birth of the IDX Suite
Now, the next phase of this journey is underway, as the IDX Suite transforms into the IDX Nexus Framework, a future-ready platform designed to meet the needs of modern, connected plants.
This is the first article in a three-part series where we share the journey behind IDX. In this series, we walk you through where we started, what we have built, and where we are going next.
