Successful Integration of Meteomatics Weather Data into Pi System Enables Numerous New Use Cases for OSIsoft Users

Actemium successfully integrated Meteomatics' weather data API into OSIsoft's PI system. This enables customers to easily integrate Meteomatics weather data directly into their own ERP and data management systems. Actemium was thus able to facilitate the use of Meteomatics weather data for an energy utility company that will use Meteomatics' high-quality data for its energy services in locations with very high temperatures.

Energy (especially for cooling) is an important issue in the hottest regions on earth. These areas include, for example, Australia, regions of the United States, and regions in Africa and Arabia. In these places, sustained temperatures in the 50-degree range during summer are not uncommon. The energy utility in this article, which does not wish to be named in this article for different reasons, is one of the leading suppliers of solutions in the field of energy and cooling. In order to better predict cooling needs and energy consumption, and thus increase resource planning and operational efficiency, the energy utility was interested in high-quality and hyperlocal weather data.

The problem - challenging requirements for data availability and visualization

The energy utility has an urgent need for process-relevant weather parameters of multiple locations to be visually accessible at any time in a dedicated central data management system, thus keeping operational efficiency permanently in the optimal range. This system must therefore be able to store weather data both in the future (7-day forecast) and historically (over years) in a long-term archive and make it visually available to the operating personnel at any time (Web-based trend displays).

Actemium builds an integration solution for a PI system

Actemium Switzerland, as an experienced system integrator for industrial and building automation, production, and data management systems, was able to quickly offer a solution based on OSIsoft's existing PI system. A PI system collects, stores and manages data from plants or processes. A PI system can comprise many different products. PI interfaces retrieve data from various data sources and send it to a PI data archive. Users on other computers can retrieve the data from the PI data archive and display it using client tools.

Thanks to many years of project experience with the PI system and use cases from many industrial sectors (pharmaceuticals, food, chemicals, energy supply, logistics), Actemium was able to implement an optimal and system-compliant solution. This allows the energy utility to integrate additional locations and additional weather data quickly and flexibly into the PI system in the future via reusable software templates.

PI Systems and Weather Data: Multiple Benefits for All Business Units

This exciting use case demonstrates how Meteomatics' weather data API can also be used in OSIsoft's PI systems through integrators such as Actemium, enabling numerous new use cases for companies running OSIsoft's PI system.

The PI System is a high-performance, real-time data acquisition system that can store millions of sensor or production data points over decades.

For this purpose, it offers more than 400 different interfaces and connectors for connection via all common industrial communication protocols.

With the central components PI Data Archive and Asset Framework, the mostly very automation-related data is transformed into a user-friendly asset model and thus made uniformly available to all departments in the company (e.g. production, quality assurance, corporate management, maintenance, development). This can be done very intuitively via web browser with PI Vision or in Excel with PI DataLink.

Based on this archived production data, recurring key figure calculations and data analyses can be stored and thus executed continuously and in real time.

In addition to the classic analog and digital process data, time-related events such as batch start and stop, limit value violations, can also be stored in so-called event frames and reported as required.

Thanks to the successful integration of Meteomatics weather data, the energy utility now has the ability to better predict the cooling needs as well as the own energy consumption, thus increasing resource planning as well as its own operational efficiency. This leads to increased planning reliability, lower risks and significant cost savings.

Weather data integration in PI systems creates benefits in numerous industries

The range of applications for PI systems with OSIsoft is very broad, as a large number of companies from a wide variety of industries already use these systems. Other use cases address the food industry, for example, when it comes to the weather-dependent demand for consumer goods (beverages, etc.) or the weather-dependent production of food (harvest quantities, etc.). Also possible is the weather-dependent optimization of logistics processes (fastest and safest route, etc.) for large transport companies as well as the application in the field of building automation (heating and climate control). As this small case study has shown, there is also a lot of potential for application, especially in the energy sector, such as the optimization and coordination of renewable energies (wind farms, hydropower, solar) for efficient integration into energy systems.