IDX 8 – Solutions for industrial data problems
Our company, Industrial Data Xchange, shares
its name with our software suite, IDX. IDX first came into being in 1995 as an
industrial data communications suite at a time when there were few options when
interconnecting real-time data systems between vendors. The original IDX
concept is fairly straightforward – it provides a pool of tags (or Slots) to
which various modules, akin to plugins, can commonly read and write real-time
data using Actions. The trick is that the modules implement the custom code to
interface with a specified system but also know how to share data into the IDX
tag pool. Therefore, as long as one has the modules developed for the system
one wants to share data between, IDX becomes a common real-time data hub. Over
time, many PLC, DCS and protocol-specific modules were developed, but for us,
the most frequently used are OPC DA, IDX TCP (our proprietary TCP protocol),
@aGlance, Gensym G2 and MODBUS, in the various flavours.
Today,
IDX 7 is largely still based on the original IDX concept, and has proved
reliable while extensible over the years and is still in use as our primary
data exchange product. However, early 2011 we released IDX 8 which, while
carrying the same name as its predecessor, now has a much wider functionality
footprint. Whereas IDX 7 addresses real-time data exchange only, IDX 8
introduces a common platform for all our industrial communications solutions.
The goal is to tightly integrate our various products in a common, user
friendly platform that can scale from simple, single machine installations to
enterprise-wide deployments which can be managed from a single point.
Currently, IDX 8
provides Tag Management, Data Exchange, Alarms and Events and Historian
functionality. These function modules are separately licensed items that
provide specific, yet often overlapping functionality:
·
Tag Management - synchronise tag configuration between
systems
·
Real-time Data Exchange – share real-time data
between systems
·
Alarms and Events (Emails/SMS) – generate
human-readable events
·
Historian – store real-time data
history
In the next few blog posts, will be providing a general overview of the various modules
in IDX 8, interesting features and new developments.