ARDI Agency

Agency is an ARDI service that allows you to create agents – tiny, individual AIs that perform alerting on your system.

These can be extremely simple, such as…

• Alerting if values exceed limits,
• Alerting if a process value is under control,
• Alerting if a machine is offline when it is expected to run, etc.

But it also allows for customised alerting, and using a wide variety of tools such as Machine Learning models to validate your values live.

This allows things like…

• Detecting discontinuities and discrepancies across multiple assets,
• Performing optimisation using goal-seeking and advanced analytics,
• Detecting abnormal values or machine conditions based on a machine learning model.

Why would you use Agency if you could just do this in your PLC?

The simple answer is that you shouldn’t. We always encourage sites to perform analytics as close-to-the-source as possible. If it’s easy to do it in your PLC or control system, you should be doing it there.

But there are cases where ARDI is a great place to perform some alerting. Particularly when…

• Combining data from multiple data sources,
• Performing analytics that can’t run on PLC or SCADA systems (ie. machine learning),
• Dynamically creating alerts on regularly-changing systems,
• Engineers are simply too busy to build alerts in your control system.

One of the advantages of the Agency system is that it works with your ARDI structure – it’s able to use the relationships between your assets to deploy your Agents.

Instead of making a single alert for a single asset, you can deploy a single alert across all assets of a type, all assets in a system or all assets with common properties. This means that new alerts automatically come online and go offline as your system evolves.