Crosstec is proud to offer a product
to help in the effort to acquire, historicize, and analyze the
data generated by your process control or automation system. We've
been
working on this product for several years, and it expands and grows
as we taylor it to meet each customer's needs. As we expand the
product to meet your needs it will benefit our existing customers
by giving them new options to explore, while at the same time you see
the benefit of the work we've done in the past to make this product
both stable and robust.
We'd like to introduce you to the Chronicle
Suite.
This is not a product that stands on its own and claims to do
everything perfectly, we don't think any product by itself can
make that boast. Rather it is a product that bridges the gap between
an established set of tools that, in and of themselves, do just
one thing, but do it extremely well.
Currently, the Chronicle Suite utilizes the following
industrial strength tools:
- Database Management System: PostgreSQL
- Object-Relational DBMS
- Highly Extensible (Data Types, Functions, Procedural Languages,
etc.)
- Comprehensive SQL support
- Supports Foreign Keys, Triggers, and Views
- Transactional Integrity
- Web Interface
- Report System
- PDF and HTML output generated using FOP (a
Java-based XSL-FO tool)
- Report templates are programmed in Perl
- Graphic plots and trends are generated using gnuplot
- KepServer EX OPC Gateway (if needed)
- Compatible with the majority of PLC vendors
- Can be used for many other tasks once put in place
- Chronicle Suite, the glue that brings it all together
As you can see from the list above, each tool we use is powerful
and extremely good at doing its assigned task. Our Chronicle Suite
simply acts as a moderator between these applications to pipe the
data from one point to the next and perform assigned tasks when required
by a user. Also, another factor that may give you more
flexibility for your particular application is that these tools,
as well as Chronicle, run equally well on just about any Operating
System or Server architecture in existence. We maintain concurrent
ports for MS Windows Server 2003, Unix style OS's such as
Linux, HP-UX, and Mac OS X.
Currently the Chronicle Suite consists of both
services (or daemons) which run continuously and a library of
executables that are simply called when they are needed.
chCollection
Chronicle's chCollection tool, is the first step in data acquisition.
Its job is to maintain connections to the data sources on your plant
network, acquire the data from these sources at a user defined interval,
and insert the collected data into the database. It's a simple, yet
robust application that does this one thing very well. In addition,
it monitors the data quality status of tags as well as any user-configured
alarms and sends these alarms and messages to the database as they
occur.
chPager
The chPager tool, continuously monitors the alarms and messages
generated by the chCollection tool (via the database) and transmits
alarms that are assigned to users to any device that will accept
an email format message. Currently, most paging and cellular services
allow this feature, additionally the message may simply be emailed
straight to the user's desktop computer.
chPeriodic
chPeriodic is a simple a scheduling application that ensures
that predetermined tasks happen when they're supposed to. It's
very
configurable.
chSupervisor
This tool's job is to monitor all the other applications to make
sure everyone's doing their job and happy.
chLibrary
chLibrary is simply a repository of standalone applications that
handle specific tasks when required. These tasks include generating
plots, interpreting report templates, etc.
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