PI Adapter for AspenTech IP21

We have been using the PI Adapter for OPC UA in its current version 1.3.0.169 to collect data from IP21 OPC UA Server during a lighthouse project. However, the configuration was a bit cumbersome since the OPC UA Server of AspenTech uses an opaque mechanism which is using a base64 encoded hexadecimal number being compiled of multiple fields of the IP21 tag configuration for the ItemID rather something usable. This brings the problem that the PI Adapter will be using the base64 encoded string as stream/tag name by default. This makes the stream/tag name unreadable. To get around this, we created an Excel table which has the Tagname and the specific attributes and then translates it to the corresponding base64 string. So automatic discovery of the PI Adapter is not useful right now and data selection is a manual but doable process if using this approach since the data selection JSON file needs to be manually built.

A solution would be to let the PI Adapter for OPC UA do an initial browse of items and then do a rebrowse to identify the tag/stream names during the discovery process.

Also, the PI Adapter for OPC UA can recover historical data perfectly well from the IP21 historian server with a very good performance. For this, it is recommended to set up a second Adapter component which just does the historical data recovery.

We did notice, that the Client Settings also need to be amended ("ReadBlockSize" parameter was set to 1, default setting was 1000) since the IP21 UA Server does not like bulk requests during initialisation of a connection.

If the limitation of the data discovery could be overcome and the PI Adapter for OPC UA would just get implemented these small changes with the re-browse during data discovery and maybe a section about IP21 specific things in the documentation, this can be a very good option without having a native PI Adapter for IP21.

Only requirement is the availability of the AspenTech IP21 OPC UA Server.

Of course, if there is no OPC UA Server available and only the CIMIO communications library then it would require the specific native IP21 connectivity.

Thank you for adding this request. As Phillip mentioned above, with AspenTech IP.21 starting to integrate OPC UA Server into the product, the Adapter for OPC UA should suffice in collecting data for this data source. Please note that the way that the Connector handles data discovery and tag/asset creation is different from our approach with the Adapter. If there is a need for an IP.21-specific adapter, please share your use case with us.

Hello Hans-Otto, thank you for this post. This is indeed a good idea we could benefit from. For a classical PIMS usage we could also think about an AF data reference so that there is no need of copying data again and again.

Hello Hans-Otto, thanks for taking action and let me share my experience: Newer versions of the Aspentech IP.21 have an integrated OPC UA Server. So to run some tests I connected an IP.21 Server via OSIsoft OPC UA connector to a PI Server several months ago. results: - the connector exactly replicates all archived values into PI Tags - new IP.21 tags were created automatically as PI tags - Tagnames were hard to read due to the fact that PI Tagnames take the OPC UA NodeID.Identifier as Tagname -> only with the AF structure You get the context Information of the actual tagname -> so i guess with some further development this would be a possible solution As my colleague Juergen Schmidt already mentioned: "For a classical PIMS usage we could also think about an AF data reference so that there is no need of copying data again and again. " We are actually looking for something like the PI Server "COM Connector for AspenTech IP.21 and Setcim" which wasn't further developed since i guess 2008.