Use cases

ABB Ability™ History is a time-series data (TSDB) management technology and Low Code Application Platform (iLCAP) for industrial use. It is a refreshingly intuitive platform for creating highly customized industrial solutions that end users can trust and use with ease.

A wide range of customers around the world use ABB Ability™ History in their mission-critical systems and applications of every size.

ABB Ability™ History is much more than just a time series database. It provides full suites of configurable platform features for ready-made applications and web browser-based low-code tools for development.

MOM – Manufacturing Operations Management

ABB Ability™ History is a trusted platform for solutions to improve production efficiency and asset utilization with its cyber-secure continuous operation and best-in-class functionality for data utilization. Production planning, tracking, and quality management benefit from the flexibility and rich functionality of ABB Ability™ History to collect data from the control systems and devices and refine it to high-quality information for production reporting and other operation functions. Open, cyber-secure standard interfaces enable integration with other production systems to improve information usability. High availability configurations with automated software upgrades ensure continuous operations even over tens of years.

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APM - Asset Performance Management

ABB Ability™ History provides an optimized platform for asset reliability improvement with condition-based, predictive, and prescriptive maintenance applications. Rich information modelling capability to create digital twins of the devices and describe the semantics of the signals with automated data acquisition and publishing in standard APIs such as OPC UA and OData is the basis for open platforms. AM systems are based on the Edge-production line-factory-cloud hierarchical system concept where applications can be run at any level with automated secure bidirectional information exchange with the device. ABB Ability™ History provides high performance to record data on a large scale as well as high-resolution data such as vibrations. Build-in functionality for aggregations by time or event makes it easy to calculate the performance indicators, trigger alarms, and visualize the results.

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PIMS - Process Information Management Systems

The most traditional use case for ABB Ability™ History is the process information management system in various industries especially in power plants and other utilities. Highly automated tooling and interfaces for data acquisition from control systems in large volumes with the utility standard data preprocessing, aggregation, alarming, and quality handling are the bases for PIMS. Reliable tooling to configure continuous calculations, easy-to-use visualization for process monitoring such as trending, and flexibility to create dashboards are appreciated by the control room operators as well as office people.

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Control system embedded historian

ABB Ability™ History is widely used as an embedded historian in control systems, gateway products, and devices. Small footprint, robust design for continuous operation, high availability, and automated data retention and backup services make ABB Ability™ History a reliable component for demanding use cases. Industrial standard APIs such as OPC UA enable easy integration with engineering tools, controllers, and operator dashboards.

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Application development - with Low Code tools

Application development with ABB Ability™ History is supported with industrial Low Code Application Platform (iLCAP) tools. Whole application development from data collection through analytics until visualization can happen without coding skills in a web browser. Subject matter experts can develop their applications by themselves which increases the productivity as well as quality of the applications.

The built-in functionalities for information modelling and aggregation of the data with the powerful tooling for calculations and visualization enable rich functionalities and all happen intuitively in web browsers. Create your information models, business logic, calculations, and visualization, and package them into an app that can be deployed to your preferred environment. Windows or Linux OS and running in embedded HW, VM, Docker, or your preferred Cloud environment provides flexibility. Life-cycle support with compatibility for new versions is built-in in the tooling based on the experience on mission-critical systems over decades.

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iLCAP Whitepaper

ABB Ability™ Secure Remote Access - ABB Ability™ SRA

As an independent component of ABB Ability™ History, ABB Ability™ Secure Remote Access (ABB Ability™ SRA) allows end-to-end secure access to resources over multiple network layers. ABB Ability™ SRA provides encrypted communications, authentication, authorisation, access control, and auditing to effectively handle remote service activities for OT devices and systems, with minimal overhead. It only requires outbound HTTPS (443) connectivity from the more secure zone to the next network zone, without the need to open firewalls or modify proxy settings.

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