The AIS system is a truely open platform, others talk of open architecture and some even have it in their system name.  However, most are not truely open for data collection and manipulation by onsite plant engineers and IT staff.  Most companies in this industry add some form of "blackbox" technology to their system to cause the customer additional costs when trying to extract data from their system, make software changes or hardware changes.  I ran into this issue at a customer facility that has another vendors system and they wanted to add an additional discrete input to their system and modify the software to look at it.  This cannot be done by field personnel and must be done by a software engineer who are not readily available and cost a good deal of money to come onsite.  The AIS system uses the opto22 PAC system for IO and Wonderware Intouch® for HMI.  Both are off-the-shelf software and hardware and our source code is provided to the customer.  Opto22 offers free training in Temecula California on the PAC software and hardware, all you pay for is transporatation, meals and lodging.  Wonderware offers several training options and is one of the easiest HMI platforms to use on the market.

     To extract data from the AIS system, you can go a couple different ways and all are free and easy to use.  You can extract data from Wonderware Intouch®, Opto22 OPC Server®, or Opto22 Datalink® that allows you to pull data from the Opto22 IO and into Microsoft Access, SQL Server, MySQL or to a file at a specific interval.  You can also send data directly from the Opto22 Processor to modbus devices and Allen Bradley Control Logix plcs via TCP/IP protocol.  We offer this to our customers and will set it up when the system is installed or when the customer is ready for data collection.  Please read the case study on the Download page that was published by Automation World.