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
The customer produces radars for non-contact level measurement of aggressive liquids or applications with hygiene requirements for water/wastewater, food, life sciences, and process industry.

Each type of radar is supplied with the FDI Device Package required to integrate field devices into an industrial control system. The FDI Device Package is a single file that contains all information including 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 also includes a User Interface Plug-in (UIP) that enables seamless integration of devices into higher-level solutions, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, or plant asset management systems (PAM). The UIP simplifies and facilitates the integration of field devices with emerging web-based industrial control systems, as well as provides the ability to use graphically enhanced user interfaces and logic of the client’s 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 was responsible for implementing the User Interface Plug-in for a family of level measurement radars dedicated to non-contact level measurement. The UIP reads radar data and enables the extended functionalities for setup, configuration, device diagnostics, firmware update, and data visualization.

The created component accesses FDI package describing the device specifics, data types, interfaces with a certain radar. Based on the information of the FDI package, the UIP allows the operator to configure system parameters, customize the graphic user interface to control radars and monitor measured data.

The Plug-in provides the ability to visualize non-calculated data, and display calculated data obtained using special libraries. The client can use their own custom libraries for data processing and visualization.

Our team has realized a set of visualizations for typical domain-oriented scenarios. One of the tasks we realized was to implement linearization to calculate fluid levels in irregularly shaped vessels.



The developed Plug-in runs in the frame of the client's control instrument without interoperability issues or compromising the system stability. The client can monitor the functioning of the radars and customize the visualization of measured data using a familiar GUI of a certain industrial system.

The web interface using HTML5 makes it possible to work on different platforms (Linux, Windows, Android, IOS) and use various end-user devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops or big screens for data visualization and equipment management.

Benefits of the developed UIP:

  • Flexible adaptation to a specific radar model or family of radars,
  • Running in the frame of the client's control system,
  • Seamless integration with other components of 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.