Comalco are implementing OSIsoft’s PI data historian across their major production sites. Their SAP-based maintenance system required key plant data to be transferred from the PIMS system into mySAP. Comalco engaged PACE to develop a client application for their OSIsoft PI system that transfers selected point data on a scheduled basis from PI into their mySAP ERP system. Data was to be passed into the mySAP portal via an internal Comalco middleware application using XML/SOAP calls.

One of the major design requirements on this project was to ensure that the SOAP transactions between the PIMS-mySAP interface application and Comalco’s middleware mySAP proxy application were validated against pre-defined XML Schemas ( .xsd) . PACE also monitored the performance and memory usage of the interface application to ensure that it would scale well with a large number of PI points.

Because an early version of the PI-SDK was used, key event queue API functions were yet to be implemented. PACE had to engineer the system to use only the functionality available in that version of the API while retaining the performance of an event driven application.  The application was successfully tested and rolled out to the production systems. Since the initial works were completed, additional projects have been completed to convert the application to use SAP-XI calls directly, by-passing Comalco ’ s internal mySAP proxy middleware tier.

Last Updated: 24-Aug-2005