AVEVA PI System Overview for Engineers
A practical overview of AVEVA PI System concepts including tags, assets, historians, AF, event frames, and dashboards.
Executive summary
AVEVA PI System is widely used in industry to collect, store, contextualize, and visualize time-series data.
For engineers, PI can become the backbone of plant analytics when it is structured correctly.
What PI System does
PI System stores historical process values such as:
- Temperatures
- Pressures
- Flows
- Currents
- Speeds
- Production rates
- Equipment status
- Mill motor current
- Kiln feed rate
- Separator speed
- Bearing temperature
- Kiln
- Raw mill
- Cement mill
- Compressor
- Fan
- Pump
- Stoppages
- Trips
- Product runs
- Cleaning cycles
- Abnormal events
- Dashboards
- Reports
- Condition monitoring
- Energy analysis
- Quality correlation
- Process troubleshooting
- Predictive maintenance datasets
PI tags
A PI tag represents a time-series measurement.
Examples:
Good tag naming and documentation are essential.
Asset Framework
Asset Framework, or AF, organizes tags into equipment and process structures.
Instead of working only with tag names, engineers can work with assets such as:
Event Frames
Event Frames represent time periods of interest.
Examples:
Event Frames are powerful for downtime and batch analysis.
Common uses
PI System can support:
Summary
PI is most valuable when raw tags are transformed into contextual information engineers can use.