Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agents are the fundamental building blocks of the Agent Server (I/O Server)
What are Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agents?
Adroit Ignite HMI Software configurations are made up of one or more collections of intelligent, cooperating objects known as Agents.
An Agent is said to be "intelligent" because, in addition to containing "state" information as would a conventional database "record" or "structure", it also embodies "action".
An Agent's "state" can therefore be defined as the collective value of all its data attributes at an instant in time, and its "action" can be defined as the collection of expectations as to how it will respond to externally generated stimuli, such as, for example, a change to one or more of its data attributes.
Agents have both generic and type-specific actions and attributes.
Generic action and attributes are something that all types of Agents possess, whereas type-specific action and attributes, as the name suggests, is something that pertains only to Agents of the specific type.
Some of the generic actions possessed by all Agent types are, for example, the ability to create, destroy, save, and load instances. Examples of generic attributes are name, description, status, etc.
Primitive Agents
The Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent, Primitive Agents are used for gathering, handling and processing data to and from the physical external world, however, they offer limited value add and are limited in functionality when compared to even the Basic Agents.
• Boolean Agent – simple container for an “On/Off” state from a PLC
• Text Agent – simple container for a Text Value
Basic Agents
The Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent, Basic Agents are used for gathering, handling and processing data to and from the physical external world. Together these form the basic building blocks of a system.
• Analog Agent – Container for a Real Value from a PLC but contains much more intelligence such as scaling, alarm levels, start state etc.
• Counter Agent – An internal Agent that allows you to use a digital as its input tag and gives all the statistics around the transitions of that state.
• Date Agent - holds time and date information is broken down into the year, month, day, hour, minute, second and millisecond constituents
• Digital Agent - stores a digital (ON/OFF) value as well as the text descriptions for each of the two discrete states
• Expression Agent – Agent for doing internal calculations and logic based on up to 20 values of other Agents within the system
• String Agent - provides a repository for text. It can hold up to 79 characters
• Stringlist Agent - allows Text to be displayed based on the value of an Integer from a PLC. Useful for representing the State of a process or machine
• Timer Agent - is able to perform several commonly used timing operations
Advanced Agents
The Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent: Advanced Agents provide the powerful SCADA and integration functionality which allows the basic Agents described above to be flexibly grouped, scripted and routed to external databases, as well as presenting related information to the user in event logs, etc. and include:
• AgentGroup Agent - Agents that are considered to have something in common can be combined into groups by means of AgentGroup agents
• Alarm Agent - controls the presentation and routing of the alarm events
• Alarmlist Agent - allows Text to be displayed based on the value of an Integer from a PLC. Useful for representing the State of a process or machine
• Command Agent - can both send and receive SMS messages via an SMS GSM modem
• DBAccess Agent - provide a link between Adroit and various external databases such as SQL Server, MS Access, FoxPro and Oracle
• DBLog Agent - is for typically logging Analog and/or Digital values to a specific table in a database for later retrieval
• DBQuery Agent - allows the user to execute queries on a database that return a single record that would be available as the .value slot of the Agent
• EventLog Agent - use the standard Windows-based Operating System functions for storage but supplement these facilities for retrieval and display
• EventOutput Agent - directs event log messages to output devices (printers, serial ports and parallel ports), and to SQL-compliant databases
• Multimedia Agent - can be used to play .WAV, .MID and .AVI multimedia files to create special audio and/or video effects on a multimedia workstation
• Notify Agent - allows alarms to be routed directly to a designated person e.g. Pager service, SMS or email address
• Script Agent - provides a basic scripting language allowing users of Adroit to automate complex or repetitive tasks
• Shift Agent - to configure your required shift patterns globally, for use by any interested agents
• Statistical Agent - provides the basic functionality to create a statistical process control strategy
MIS/MES Agents
The Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent: MIS/MES Agents are the building blocks around getting more from your Adroit Ignite system. They are very specific and usually, quite complex Agents used to do monitor, control and solve higher-level shop-floor and general industrial challenges. The MIS/MES Agent available :
• Accumulator Agent - analyses an accumulating process value to calculate its difference in value (or delta) between successive events or over a specific time period.
IT/IoT Agents
The Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent: These Agents are the building blocks around integration and management of SCADA and IT and are summarised here and the most important IT Agents are described in more detail below.
• Perfmon Agent - is used to monitor Windows Performance counters, which belong to performance objects such as the Agent Server, Processor, Memory and others
• The IoT Agent - has been officially incorporated for use with IoT-type devices such as Sigfox etc. The mechanism was revised to allow new IoT-type agents to be created based on templates from the config editor. A number of templates are shipped with the base product but this will expand over time and can be customised based on each user's needs
System Agents
These include Agents not actually usable in configuration but contain the system functions necessary to run the Adroit Ignite HMI Software Agent Server and include:
• Alias Agent - creates a reference to an existing agent to adopt its behaviour and state information
• Beeper Agent – runs the PC Beeper Sound
• Datalog Agent – contains the datalog Agents that are created when a user logs a process value
• Device Agent – contains the configuration and state of device communications
• HASP Agent – Licensing Key
• Proxy Agent - provides continuous updates of the value of an agent referenced from a remote Agent Server
• Scan Agent – contains the configuration of the PLC scanning
• SystemInformation Agent – contains lots of useful System Configuration tags and general information about the configuration
