Date: 22/08/2011

MathWorks adds OPC-HDA support for process Historian Data Analysis within MATLAB

MathWorks has announced a major update of the OPC Toolbox product, offering support for the OPC Foundation Historical Data Access (HDA) standard.

According to MathWorks, MATLAB users can use this OPC HAD server in the Power & utilities, Chemical and Oil & Gas industries to access and visualize historical process data, identify trends, and perform root cause analysis to improve their operations.

As per MathWorks, data acquisition platforms are critical tools for gathering, archiving and serving enterprise data as to perform advanced analyses and extract information from the massive volumes of process data requires a powerful analytical engine, by using OPC HDA access in OPC Toolbox, process specialists can efficiently apply MATLAB data visualization, data analysis, and numeric computation capabilities to historical OPC data. They can also automate common analysis tasks, generate reports, create customized data analysis GUIs, or integrate these analytics back into their process historian.

"The process industries are faced with the challenge of quickly analyzing the volumes of data they have collected and performing root cause analysis to continually improve operations," said Graham Dudgeon, energy production industry marketing manager, MathWorks. "By providing easier access to this data within MATLAB environment, we are enabling process engineers to perform more advanced analyses, such as root cause analysis, which can lead to significant process improvements and cost savings."