AiVibeProcess Historian
A process historian is a database application optimised for collecting, compressing, storing and retrieving large volumes of time-stamped process data from control systems, providing the long-term record used for trending, analysis and reporting.
A historian collects tag values from PLCs, DCS controllers and SCADA servers through interfaces such as OPC UA, OPC Classic or native drivers. Each sample is stored with a timestamp and a quality indicator. To keep long-term storage economical, historians apply deadband or exception filtering and compression algorithms, such as the swinging door method, that discard points which can be reconstructed within a set tolerance. Clients retrieve raw, interpolated or aggregated values for trends, reports and analytics.
Historians are central to the process industries and are also widely used in discrete manufacturing. Engineers use them to investigate incidents, compare batches, tune control loops and verify that processes stayed within limits. They feed reports on production, energy consumption and environmental compliance, and supply the data for predictive maintenance, analytics and digital twins. In regulated sectors, historian records support quality and audit requirements.
Design choices include sampling rates, compression settings, retention periods, redundancy, time synchronisation and how data is buffered if the network fails. Over-aggressive compression can remove detail needed for later analysis. Historians differ from general time-series databases mainly in their industrial connectivity, data-quality handling and asset context, although the two categories increasingly overlap.
Key points
- Stores time-stamped tag values with quality information
- Compression and deadbands keep long-term storage manageable
- Data sources include PLCs, DCS, SCADA and OPC servers
- Supports trends, incident analysis, reporting and analytics
- Compression settings trade storage against analytical detail
Where AiVibe comes in
AiVibe designs and manufactures the AiAmbA AI Factory, whose edge devices and AI agents let people talk to PLC, CNC and robot controllers in plain language. Agents only propose changes, a trained operator confirms each one, and the AI Factory never replaces a machine's control or safety systems.
Related terms
- Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)PLC & Industrial Control
- Distributed Control System (DCS)PLC & Industrial Control
- OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA)Industrial IoT & Edge
- Predictive Maintenance (PdM)Quality, Reliability & Maintenance
- Digital TwinIndustrial IoT & Edge
- Anomaly DetectionAI & Machine Learning