Advanced Continuous Historian fundamentals

There are three main aspects of continuous data collection and presentation:

Definition of historical data to be collected in the modules and nodes
Storage and management of the data by a Continuous Historian subsystem
Presentation of the data through DeltaV Process History View or client applications

Historical data collection

History collection is a function used in the DeltaV Explorer and Control Studio to define the module parameters or node parameters to be monitored and stored in the Advanced Continuous Historian. History collection is an integral part of a module. If you copy a module, the new module includes the defined history collection. Library module templates include history collection, which can be modified by the user.

Because a DeltaV system can contain more than one historian, including the DeltaV Continuous Historian, the Advanced Continuous Historian, or OSIsoft PI Server, the history collection configuration for a history tag can be used by more than one type of historian at the same time.

Important

When naming modules to be historized in the Advanced Continuous Historian, follow these rules:

The tag name must be unique.
The beginning character of the tag name must be an English alphanumeric character, underscore (_), or percent sign (%).
A tag name begining with a hyphen (-) or dollar sign ($) character is supported; however, DeltaV prepends the character x to the beginning of the tag name.

Historical data storage

The Advanced Continuous Historian allows high-volume data capture of time-series parameter values and efficient storage of these values to disk.

Each DeltaV Application Station with the Advanced Continuous Historian installed includes a storage area that holds a number of data archives.

Historical data presentation: Process History View

Process History View is the application that is used to display real-time and historical data from the Continuous Historian subsystem as well as from the DeltaV Event Chronicle, a subsystem that stores system events and alarms. Module and node trends are plotted on a graph, and events are displayed in a tabular grid format.

You must download the setup data for each Application Station where the Advanced Continuous Historian is enabled as a Continuous Historian subsystem in order for the Process History View to display the historical data.

Tip

To improve performance when opening a chart for historical data collected with the Advanced Continuous Historian or with a PI Server enterprise historian, click File → Set Default Data Servers, and then enable the Connect to Advance Continuous Historian Server option on the Continuous Historian tab of the Set Default Data Servers dialog.