Learn about modeling equipment and data

For each asset that you want to monitor, you create an AF element. An asset can be anything, but typically it is a particular piece of equipment, or a part of a piece of equipment. To associate data with an element, you create attributes on the element. Attributes can hold simple values, representing fixed information, such as the diameter of a tank. An attribute can alternatively reference a PI point, a formula, a value from a relational database, and more.

For example, suppose you have a pump with three associated pieces of data: the pressure (read from a PI point), the inlet temperature, and the outlet temperature. To model this in PI AF, you can create a PI AF element to represent the pump and then create three attributes to represent the associated data.

The following illustration shows how the data might look in PI AF. Although all the values are PI point values, the user never needs to know the names of the PI points.

PI AF presents asset data in a meaningful way