REAL TIME SOLUTIONS OF AMERICA INC. 1101 Seventeenth Street NW, Suite 1100 Washington D.C. 20036-4798 United States of America

RTA in control: Process data management in real-time
	In over 150 years SIEMENS has become one of the worlds leading companies in electrical engineering. More than 460,000 employees in over 190 countries are working today in a series of business segments, ranging from Transportation, Communications and Medical to Power and Automation. Out of that number of employees more than 55,000 are working in research and development. So it is not surprising that Siemens has developed its own Unix operating system called SORIX. A real-time capable Unix tuned to run on Siemens industrial SICOMP computers, the perfect solution for process automation. But what has this to do with RTA? In 1995 SIEMENS decided to bundle the product RTA-PLS and its SICOMP/SORIX product line to a product for process control and management called PDM - Process Data Manager. In the same year SIEMENS presented this new product at the "Echtzeit", a fair for real-time products, in Karlsruhe Germany. But what exactly is RTA-PLS and what makes it so unique. RTA-PLS - the real-time Process Control System based on international and industrial standards     RTA-PLS is a process-control and management system that is completely based on RTA - Real Time Architecture. RTA is a software development platform for the implementation of real time applications. RTA-PLS thus provides a very high data processing performance and is available on a wide range of operating system platforms. Due to its open system architecture, which results from the standardized software components that make up RTA-PLS, it is most suitable for implementing SCADA systems that make great demands on real-time and open architecture. RTA-PLS consists of the following components: PLS-Preprocessor it represents the brain of RTA-PLS which has implemented the rules to do all application specific data processing and process controlling in real time. PLS-Interface it provides to all components of RTA-PLS a homogeneous subsystem interface including standardized data types for a series of different process control subsystems. PLS-Formula this is a high performance formula interpreter that allows very flexible definitions of relationships between process data points. Changes in process data immediately launch the recalculation of formulas and PLS-Formula provides the results in real time. PLS-Vis offers interfaces for the easy integration of modern graphical tools like DataViews or UimXmove, without the need of 3thGL programming. By using this interfaces, graphical tools can make use of all available events and process data points in real time for the purpose of process visualization and process control. PLS-Trend is a very fast, configurable, short term based archive for process data. Data stored with PLS-Trend can later be used for process simulations or data analysis. PLS-ArcEv is a configurable long term based archive that allows tunable events of process data points to be collected in real time and to be stored in a relational database. PLS-ArcTime is a long term based archive that allows to take snapshots from the whole process data image and all derived values in configurable time frames and to store this snapshots in a relational database PLS-Logger provides functions to store configurable groups of events in different log files and to display and print views of this log files.       RTA-PLS is used world-wide in numerous applications in the following areas: power stations pipelines (oil and gas) traffic control systems computer aided dispatching systems production control systems A series of process control subsystems are supported by RTA-PLS like e.g.: ABB Master ABB PROCONTROL 214 DC77 radio controlled clock SAT1703 (PCM-interface) SATTCONTROL SIEMENS FW537 (TC57-interface) SIEMENS SIMATIC (3964R and SINEC H1) RTA-PLS is available on many operating systems like e.g.: OpenVMS DecUnix SORIX SunSolaris AIX Windows NT 4.0 / 2000