An Overview of the Plant Model in Application Server

In previous posts I provided an overview of the objects you get out of the box when you create a new Galaxy in Application Server. When discussing the System Objects I (very) briefly mentioned two important configurations of a Galaxy: the Plant Model and the Deployment Model.

Today I want to talk a little bit about the Plant Model.

The Plant Model (or Area Model as sometimes is referred to) is a hierarchical representation of the plant floor. It includes all the objects in your Galaxy, arranged based on the physical layout of the plant. You build the plant model in the Model View of the ArchestrA IDE.

The key object to build the plant model is the Area object. How the plant floor is "divided" will dictate the base of your plant model. Afterwards, your organize the rest of the equipment (objects) based on their physical location by assigning them to their corresponding areas.

For example, let's say that the plant floor has 3 main sections: receiving, processing, and packaging:

If the processing area has 2 production lines, the model will look something like this:

If there are 3 packing lines, the model will be updated to:

So far the model is composed of just Area objects. As I mentioned earlier, all of your objects, regardless of type, will show up in the plant model. So after adding all the equipment in the plant floor and assigning the objects to corresponding areas, the model will look something like this:

Let's not forget about the System and Device Integration Objects. We could create a "control room" area to hold all our computers, engines, and PLC objects:

The Plant Model is also how alarms are distributed in the system; for example, if the production area has two production lines, the operator for Line 1 will only want to see alarms for that area, while the Production Supervisor might want to see alarms for both lines.

I'll visit the Deployment Model in a future post.