The objective of this project was to demonstrate the latest web-enabling technology in a relevant, real-world application, i.e. monitoring renewable energy facilities, such as wind farms. Many businesses use key performance indicators (KPI) and business activity monitoring (BAM) to continuously monitor their progress toward corporate goals. A radar or kiviat chart is particularly useful for monitoring of KPIs, because pattern recognition can provide a quick synopsis of overall operations to an operator.
Here are the highlights:
- Displays real-time plant data in radar (kiviat) chart or bar chart format
- Shows 8-16 real-time data points from the OSI Software PI Historian along with target values
- Allows easy comparison of actual and target values, great for Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
- Versions for SharePoint Server and standard IIS web site
- Links off-the-shelf ComponentOne and Microsoft Silverlight components (pull-down, chart, time range selector, and flexible data grid) within a composite Silverlight web part
- Incorporates Microsoft Silverlight client-side web support, including local data caching, which allows web part manipulation at animation-like speed and live updating of values without whole screen re-writes
- Developed in Microsoft C#
Demonstration of Silverlight Radar Chart Web Part by Nimble Solutions and Todd Schick of ComponentOne (hi res screencast)
Demonstration of Silverlight Radar Chart Web Part by Nimble Solutions and Todd Schick of ComponentOne (low res screencast)
Sample Silverlight Radar Chart Web Part Screen Shots Within SharePoint
A. This example uses eight wind farms in the U.S. for a mythical utility, NUGreen Energy. The Radar Chart shows two graphs. The actual MW output values are shown in blue, the target MW values are shown in yellow. The operator can quickly see that the Santa Monica and Guadalupe wind farm are producing above their targets, while the other farms are producing at their targets.
B. Horizontal bar charting is an option with pull-down selection (at top). Here actual (blue bars) and target (yellow bars) can be seen for each wind farm.
C. Data can also be shown with vertical bars. In all cases, actual data and target data are shown in the grid below the chart for the time selected.
D. The Silverlight Radar Chart Web Part caches 24 hours of data on the local client computer. By manipulating the time-range slider, data from 19 hours ago can be viewed. Here, the Napa Valley wind farm is way above target, while the Cedar Rapids and Sioux City wind farms are under-performing.
E. Here data is shown from 5.5 hours earlier. The Santa Monica and Guadalupe wind farms were having production problems at that time.
F. By parking the time slider back to the far right (current time), the radar chart web part will resume its real-time, one-minute updates.
