Comms software connects lime kiln control to a central data historian

September 2001 System Integration & Control Systems Design

BeST's Industrial Data Exchange (iDX) software, used for the integration of diverse information sources in process automation, manufacturing execution systems, and enterprise resource planning systems, is currently being installed at the Sappi Ndogwana's lime kiln to feed realtime plant data into an OSI PI data historian.

A pair of iDX services will be installed on two Honeywell PlantScape Servers operating with redundancy - in the event of a fault (or by manual request) the current 'active' server will fail over to the backup server. Each iDX service connects via OPC to the currently active PlantScape server and automatically tracks the fail-over mechanism while passing plant information up to a remote OSI PI data historian. Only one of the iDX links to PI will be active at any time with 'heartbeats' on each service used to control which service should do the actual data feed.

iDX is a single suite of middleware products that facilitates realtime data exchange between different new and legacy systems. It also bridges the 'communications gap' between industrial processes and business systems. BeST now has iDX installed at many blue-chip clients including Caltex, Sasol (Secunda & Polymers), PPC, Samancor, Avmin, Cable & Wireless and Iscor.

BeST SA

(011) 884 0510

robt@bestholdings.com

www.bestholdings.com

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