Improving industrial application's performances with an Historian

The Centralized Power Generation Optimization Center of CDF uses several applications dealing with real time data from power generating stations and consummation trends. Helicooptere is the application that acquires real time power generation data from all the EDF nuclear, conventional thermal and hydraulic power plans. The particularity is that these data are first acquired by the Transmission System Operator, who retransmits them to Helicooptere using TASE.2 protocol. Helicooptere was developed on a specific EDF solution to response to immediate needs. After 4 years of utilization, we noted an inadequate level of performance of the application, mainly due to the increasing number of web based clients and an untimely redundancy of the database Moreover, the maintenance costs are getting higher than initially foreseen and the application can't cope with the rapid evolutions of the user needs. Our work's objective was to propose several solutions for rebuilding Helicooptere with MES based data Historian software. We made two testing models based on two data Historians leaders: 1P21 (by Aspentech) and PI (by OSIsoft). Their abilities to integrate the three stages (Acquisition task, Application logic and data Publication), to interpret timestamps, to support multiple acquisition protocols, to support complex data models, and to propose a high availability and secured architecture, make the testing models so conclusive that EDF decided to rebuild Helicooptere with a data Historian.