Control system embedded historian

The primary purpose of the Industrial Control System (ICS) is to monitor and control the production process. It consolidates different industrial equipment and systems into an all-in-one automation platform to improve engineering efficiency, operator performance, and asset utilization.

The ABB Ability™ System 800xA (system 800xA) is used in nearly every industry sector to control, automate and coordinate almost any aspect of production. Its' ability to integrate various field equipment, systems and applications promotes collaboration between equipment, systems, and people.

The use case of Ability™ History in system 800xA is to manage the long-term storing of time series data and events regarding processes and production. System 800xA stores the valuable data to 800xA History (ABB Ability™ History) and utilizes the long-term history for actionable insights on user-friendly dashboards. Incorporating ABB Ability™ History within the control system enriches the service by collecting, storing, aggregating, and retrieving process data with details and integrity. Ability™ History empowers control systems, gateway products, and devices by transforming the collected data into information for operational decision-making in real-time and/or advanced business analysis.

In a typical system 800xA installation, Ability™ History is installed in the connectivity servers in the role of data collector node (DCN) to collect real-time data and provide short-term, i.e., 1-3 months, data to operator displays.

All DCNs are connected to the main Ability™ History which is often at the factory-level network outside of the cyber-isolated control network. DCN nodes are fully integrated with the control system engineering (in this case system 800xA), so they don’t need any additional engineering efforts.

Main Ability™ History consolidates factory-level process and production data and stores it over long periods, e.g., 1-10 years. Control system operators have transparent secure access to long-term history from their operator dashboards. The other purpose of main Ability™ History is to act as a data source for factory-level applications and systems such as manufacturing operations management (MOM) integration.

ABB Ability™ History provides seamless storage of real-time and long-term process data. It ensures optimized and fault-tolerant redundant data collection and increased data quality and usability for applications and users.

Ability™ History is equipped with industry-standard interfaces such as OPC®UA, OPC Classic, and Modbus to collect data at a millisecond rate without compromising its quality. It uses a highly scalable, secure real-time data infrastructure to store a large volume of data fulfilling the demand of complex systems like 800xA.

Control system integration

The integration with the control system is typically based on the following interfaces.

Engineering integration is implemented with data abstraction interface .NET API for Variable (Tag/log) and equipment model configuration. The external system, e.g. System 800xA, is the master of the configuration and it creates and maintains the Variables in ABB Ability™ History.

OPC (classic or UA) DA for data acquisition from the control system and to write set points and other values produced in ABB Ability™ History back to the control system. In some cases, the control system is pushing the DA values to the History with the data abstraction interface or APIs above it.

OPC AE for alarms and events recording. Alarms and events can also be ingested with the data abstraction interface.

Long-term history data retrieval from ABB Ability™ History to control system operator stations is implemented with OPC (classic or UA) HDA.

System status information of ABB Ability™ History down to the control system can be retrieved with the data abstraction interface.

The data abstraction interface is used for reading the long-term event histories from ABB Ability™ History down to the control system operator stations.

The control system integration is established with an ABB Ability™ History data collector node that provides data buffering and redundancy between the control system and the main history node.

All the interfaces for System 800xA are provided by the ABB Ability™ History data collector software that receives the configuration, collects and buffers data from 800xA, and provides history data access for System 800xA to retrieve long-term history from the main ABB Ability™ History node. All the configuration and data transfer between the data collector and the main ABB Ability™ History is handled with secure communication enabling them to be on different security zones.

The intuitive technology applied in Ability™ History increases data usability beyond the control rooms in hierarchical systems and allows various types of data transformation per user request - raw history, real-time values, alarms & events, and various aggregates as pre-calculated or on-the-fly with query filters. The data access APIs support industry standard protocols such as OData, ODBC/SQL, OPC®UA, and WSS. APIs are cyber-secure with user authentication from customer-preferred user account management, secure transport, and role-based user access authorization.

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