Customer
A global leader in measurement instrumentation, services, and solutions for industrial process engineering. The company provides solutions for flow, level, pressure, analytics, temperature, recording and digital communications, optimizing processes in terms of economic efficiency, safety, and environmental impact.

Challenge
Our customers manufacture radars for non-contact level measurement in challenging environments such as aggressive liquids or applications with hygiene requirements. To facilitate integration into industrial control systems, each radar is equipped with the FDI Device Package. This comprehensive package includes device definitions, user interface plug-ins, certificates, manuals, and other components that are essential for configuring and managing the field devices.

 

The FDI Device Package features a User Interface Plug-in (UIP) that ensures seamless integration into higher-level solutions like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and plant asset management systems (PAM). The UIP simplifies the integration process with emerging web-based industrial control systems, offering graphically enhanced user interfaces aligned with client enterprise systems.

Our challenge was to develop the User Interface Plug-in to provide direct access to the devices for control, configuration, import and export of data. The UIP should ensure quality process monitoring, data visualization, and device management according to the client’s interface standards.

Solution
Our team tackled the challenge by developing the User Interface Plug-in for a family of level measurement radars dedicated to non-contact level measurement. The UIP reads radar data and provides extended functionalities for setup, configuration, device diagnostics, firmware updates, and data visualization.
This component accesses the FDI package, describing device specifics and interfaces with a particular radar. Leveraging information from the FDI package, the UIP allows operators to configure system parameters, customize graphic user interfaces, and monitor measured data.
The Plug-in facilitates the visualization of non-calculated and calculated data using special libraries. Clients can also use custom libraries for data processing and visualization. Our team implemented visualizations for domain-oriented scenarios, including linearization to calculate fluid levels in irregularly shaped vessels.


The developed Plug-in seamlessly operates within the client's control instrument, ensuring stability without interoperability issues. Clients can monitor radar functioning and customize data visualization using a familiar GUI of a specific industrial system.
The web interface, powered by HTML5, offers cross-platform compatibility (Linux, Windows, Android, IOS) and supports various end-user devices for data visualization and equipment management.

Benefits of the developed UIP:

  • Flexible adaptation to specific radar models or radar families;
  • Integration within the client's control system framework;
  • Seamless integration with other components of the client's data processing libraries.

Results
The created User Interface Plug-in enables convenient configuration and control of a family of radars for level measurement within the industrial system that support FDI.