Now that we have OPC events triggering rule scripts in KSX, I wanted to develop a simple and elegant way to process the events. On a couple of different projects, I have used the concept of a filter graph, that is, a chain of connected filters that can each consume, alter and/or pass on incoming objects to other filters further down the graph. The very core of KSX is the node tree, which is simply an object graph. Read more...

On a recent visit to a client site in Chile, the process control team expressed their dismay at the overwhelming number of alarms that the control room operators must acknowledge daily. This alarm volume led to the operators generally ignoring most alarms, and also led to the problem that import alarms were easily overlooked as they were buried in the long list of alarms from the plant. Read more...

Here is an interesting trick that allows you to monitor your Windows processes with KSX. You can leverage the KSX shell function with the Windows tasklist command.

The following windows batch code will return the memory use of the ksxserver.exe application.

@echo off
tasklist /fo table /nh /fi "imagename eq ksxserver.exe" > tasklist.txt

His Excellency José Goñi, Chilean Ambassador to the United States, made a visit to Utah on October 8th & 9th. KnowledgeScape had the privilege of being the only Utah business on his itinerary. We were able to visit with the ambassador and discuss our services and software, KSX. Read more...

If you have an HMI, you have a visualization and interface tool to aid you in your operation and decision making. Your HMI presents you with the data that you need to operate your process. In the process of installing and designing the HMI you have decided what data the operators, engineers, and/or management need to make the necessary decisions to best suit your business. You may have aggregated data or shown the state of some piece of equipment, etc. All of this data has been designed so that people in your organization can make the right choice. Read more...

If you use Wonderware, or any of the other HMI's commonly used we're looking for you. KSX is designed to add intelligence to every and anything. Through our industry standard OPC bridge it is extremely simple to connect our KSX to your HMI. By doing so you now can make any of the equipment you monitor and control intelligent. Intelligent, rule based alarming is a snap. Intelligent set point decisions using the best heuristics possible can relentlessly monitor your process pushing performance to the highest possible levels possible. Read more...

An expert control system, as we think of them, is an expert system, or artificial intelligence program, that has been specifically created to monitor and control some kind of processing plant in real-time. They are sometimes also referred to as a supervisory control program although supervisory control is not usually thought to utilize artificial intelligence components. Read more...

We just received another award. Its always great to get a little recognition!

One element of building automation that I would like to explore further is the concept of just-in-time temperature control. In my last post I gave an overview of how KSX fits into the overall building automation sphere. Now I would like to press further into some details. Read more...