Gathering and providing industrial production data has historically been an expensive undertaking - not because of costly sensors but rather due to the cost of setting up power and communication cables, establishing connections to controllers and gateways, and integrating measurements into the automation architecture. Given all of this effort, it may be surprising to learn that the data gathered and stored remains largely unused. In the future, low-cost sensing technology will provide even more data. It is estimated that a modern wind farm equipped with new sensor technology may generate 150,000 data points every second [1]. The keys to managing and creating value from large amounts of such operational data are to provide easy access and portability of data, combine operational data with data based on IT (information technology), and define business intelligence and logic based on data. ABB's Decathlon Services platform provides the technology to implement all three elements. Copyright © 2016 ABB Technology Ltd.
