Companies evaluate and procure systems for each business need they have. Through the evaluation process, companies decide the best solution for the particular business issue or need they are overcoming. Within a few years, a company has different systems to resolve their business needs and then discover that there is no easy, single method to integrate, share or access the information from each system. As a result of these technology silos, another solution is required to easily integrate and share information between major systems. Further, in control system environments, real-time data is key to successful decision making, so the data exchange and sharing needs to support the extreme mission critical real-time data. To use common terminology, the need is for a service oriented architecture (SOA). In most process control environments, a standard called OPC (OLE for Process Control) has developed that works effectively for any system that supports the OPC interface. The electric utility and energy industries are also considering an enterprise service bus (ESB).

P-Tech has a very straightforward solution to provide real-time information integration, providing users access to real-time information that is resident on multiple platforms. For example, within an electric control operation, it is quite common to see a SCADA system, a weather system, a network management system, as well as other special function systems to control load management or generation management. All of these “best of breed” solutions are real-time systems and all have critical information that must be delivered to operators and users. Individual, and sometimes proprietary interfaces, are developed for these disparate systems to exchange data. Moreover, there have been some industry standards developed to assist in the exchange of data between real time systems. One such example is ICCP. ICCP is a great tool to exchange data between control systems; however, there are many other systems that need to be integrated that do not support ICCP. These other systems support other information technology standards and method to easily interface, exchange and share data and data quality with users, operators and other programs. P-Tech captures upon all those standards.

P-Tech supports the service oriented architecture with a solution to easily enhance a company’s infrastructure to add service oriented functionality. And, it is a solution that meets the performance requirements of a real time control environment. P-Tech’s solution is a product called GridGuardian.

GridGuardian has a point and click interface to establish data retrieval to the disparate systems. GridGuardian is delivered with it’s own application program interface (API), but also can easily use other parties’ APIs, as well as ODBC, JDBC, TCP/IP (to talk to older equipment), OPC, etc. Based upon licenses purchased, these interfaces will be included in the delivered library of GridGuardian to quickly provide a service oriented architecture in a real-time environment.

GridGuardian can be triggered to capture data based upon an external event at one system, triggering activity on another system. Or GridGuardian can initiate data capture from other systems based upon an internal clock so that data could be captured on a defined interval. Finally, GridGuardian can capture data based upon the analysis of certain circumstances that have occurred. GridGuardian can then take this captured data and notify appropriate operations personnel based upon state changes, analog value changes outside a deadband, & alarm, event or program messages. As a result of any of the above methods of responding to situations or on an interval, GridGuardian can trigger another script or Java code to execute. Therefore, GridGuardian becomes a hugely powerful service oriented product.