General benefits

New features are developed to CI/CD pipeline and they will be released frequently. Systems that are kept updated, will get the new features automatically. If there is a need for a feature that doesn’t exist yet, by creating a feature request and getting it approved, you can get a new feature with a relatively short delivery time.

Bug fixing is done first to CI/CD pipeline and delivered frequently. Bug fixing to CI/CD pipeline is easier and faster because it is continuously under development and testing.

Cyber security needs continuous improvements and updating possibly vulnerable 3rd party components. This is in the focus of the CI/CD pipeline as well as regular cyber security testing.

Web, mobile dashboarding

With the HTML5 based View UI SDK modern web and mobile user interfaces can be implemented to various industrial solutions and applications efficiently and meeting the expectations from the UX designs.

Industrial Low Code Application tools

iLCAP tools enable application development without the need for coding skills. The whole application development path in a web browser from system configuration and monitoring to information modelling, data acquisition, calculations, and dashboarding.

CI/CD version contains significant improvements to equipment modelling and to tools to implement model-based applications. Engineering of the calculations in the web browser-based tool enables easy engineering with the power to implement advanced applications and e.g. integrations with ML services. Mobile and web application development with the new tooling has improved significantly productivity.

New bulk load tools enable equipment model-based system configuration and deployment of the applications.

History functionalities

The basic time series data handling of ABB AbilityTM History has been working for years in thousands of installations, but there are still frequently introduced new functionalities. One is key-value storage which enables flexible storing of any kind of data and still supports indexing. In standard functionalities, this is now utilized in event logs (OPCEventLog and EquipmentEventLog). When connecting and recording events from devices and 3rd party control systems we don’t need to know in advance what is the structure of their events, i.e. which kinds of attributes and data types, but they can all be collected to the same event log and used e.g. in dashboards.

Alarm notifications have been implemented as separate applications in many systems. Now it is available as part of the standard functionality and can be configured with the engineering tools.

Blob storage enables e.g. storing of reports, pictures, and other documents and browsing them in a user interface.

Hierarchical – networked systems

Netsync service provides secure bidirectional data transfer between ABB AbilityTM History nodes with an efficient rule-based configuration that supports automatic backfilling. Netsync can be extended with additional protocols to feed data to 3rd party systems. There are already extensions and more will come with the new versions.

APIs

OData interface has been extended with e.g. access to current values and in addition to reading the data, it supports also writing the data.

OPC UA interfaces have been provided by ABB AbilityTM History already 10 years, and now there are new implementations of both UA server and UA client with additional functionalities and multi-platform support.

VtrinLib is the backbone of all the public APIs and it is frequently enhanced e.g. with new data retrieval filters.

Deployment platforms

Linux has been supported by core ABB AbilityTM History already quite some time, but CI/CD version includes all the relevant services. The same is also available as a Docker container and the system can be orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Performance

There has been continuous improvement in performance and resource usage throughout the whole lifetime of ABB AbilityTM History and CI/CD version includes frequent enhancements that increase user satisfaction.