Business Scenarios for Plant Connectivity

Remote Monitoring

This scenario allows an administrator to monitor a large number of PCo installations remotely. The administrator can manually add PCo installations or use an SLD (system landscape directory) to select PCo installations. Once set up, the following steps can be carried out for each PCo installation:

• Monitoring of the overall status for the PCo installation

• Monitoring of the status of each agent instance in a PCo installation

• Starting/stopping an agent instance

• Retrieval of logs

• Retrieval of configuration files

• Import of configuration files

The following table describes the overall installation sequence for PCo, with all available software units. For information about the software units to be installed, see the section above called Software Component Matrix.

Retrieval of Tag Information from Shop Floor System

If you implement this scenario, you can get access from SAP MII to data from any shop floor system for which a PCo agent exists. This includes:

• Reading tag data

• Writing tag data

• Reading time series (historical data)

For the software units to be used, see the above section called Software Component Matrix.

The implementation sequence is as follows:

Event Notification to SAP MII

If you implement this scenario, you can establish notification processes that will send notification messages to SAP MII, based on events or predefined trigger conditions for SAP MII.

The events or trigger conditions depend on shop floor data (for example, when the temperature value of a sensor reaches a critical limit). The notification message can contain any shop floor data that is retrievable by PCo.

The implementation sequence is as follows:

Event Notification Using Web Services and Enhanced Notification Processing

An interface is available for implementing enhanced notification processing (ENP). Enhanced notification processing (ENP) enables you to flexibly control and document the data flow in production in connection with various destination systems, for example, with Web services. In this way, you can connect a third-party system, such as SAP ME, to PCo and transfer data from machine level to the desired SAP ME activity using Web service calls. This makes it possible, for example, starting from PCo, to call a Web service provided by SAP ME, evaluate the result of the call, and then, depending on the results of the Web service call, call an additional Web service or write data back to a source system.

SAP delivers the standard enhancement Destination System Calls with Response Processing for enhanced notification processing with which you can execute one or multiple destination system calls and with which you can write back the results of the calls to the data source of the agent instance or other agent instances. This covers the most common requirements in communication between data sources of production and business systems.

If you want to implement requirements that go beyond the function scope of the SAP standard enhancement, you can implement a customer-owned enhancement. PCo provides an interface for this purpose that you can implement. The notification enhancement is mapped in the form of a destination system so that the enhancement is called as part of a notification process.

Enhanced notification processing enables you to do the following:

• You can call one or more destination systems one after the other in any order. This might be, for example, a regular Web service or a RESTful Web service.

• You can call mass-enabled destination systems (Web services) for multiple object instances, for example, for multiple SFCs when connected to SAP ME.

• You can assign the output expressions of a notification to the parameters of a Web service statically or dynamically.

• You can perform a program-controlled evaluation of the results of a destination system call and react to the results accordingly.

• After a notification message is received, the destination system can send information to a specific agent and update, for example, a tag value in the source system.

• You can send data to a destination system of the type ODBC destination.

For more information about Destination System Calls with Response Processing, see https://help.sap.com/pco (Application Help  SAP Plant Connectivity  Processes and Integration Scenarios with SAP PCo  Integration w. Third-Party Systems Using Enhanced Notification Processing   Destination System Calls with Response Processing).

The implementation sequence is as follows:

Event Notification Writing to a SAP HANA Database

SAP HANA databases allow you to efficiently analyze high volume time-series data, for example, measurement data from technical equipment. PCo 15.0 or higher offer several options to write notification data to a SAP HANA database. You can, for example, write notification data to an ODBC destination connected to a HANA database table.

The implementation sequence is as follows:

Orchestration of Independent Machine Units on Shop Floor Level

Choreographies of machines and machine units had to be programmed inside the PLC or in the master computer in a classical environment. A change of a tag value (for example done by PCo) triggered a program inside a PLC which in turn steered the machines or machine units. PCo allows those sequences to be modeled outside of the PLC by configuration. Running PCo as an OPC UA server and using OPC UA destination systems enables communication through method calls between the machine units, based on the OPC UA protocol.