Basics
Glossary
The terms that come up most often when talking about industrial data, explained in one line.
The recurring terms in the IDA documentation and, more generally, in an industrial monitoring project. In alphabetical order.
Alarm A rule that watches a measurement and fires when the defined condition is met: a threshold exceeded, a comparison that turns true, a data stream that stops arriving. Firing is followed by a notification to the people concerned.
Availability One of the three OEE factors: how much of the planned time the machine actually spent producing, net of unplanned stops.
CO₂ equivalent (CO₂eq) A unit of measure that brings different greenhouse gases back to a single comparable number. In energy monitoring it is the estimate of the emissions associated with the measured consumption.
Cycle One repetition of the machine's work: a press stroke, a machining operation, a completed unit. Counting cycles is the most direct way to measure how much a machine has produced.
Device Whatever sends data: a meter, a sensor, a machine, a system that exposes its own data. It is the smallest unit IDA attaches measurements, properties and alarms to.
Energy carrier The form of energy or the fluid being measured: electricity, natural gas, water, compressed air, steam. It determines the unit of measure and the way consumption translates into cost and emissions.
Gateway A node installed in the plant that collects data from equipment not reachable from outside and forwards it to the cloud. Typically needed for segregated factory networks and for plants that predate IoT.
KPI Key performance indicator: a number computed from the measurements that summarises a trend (specific consumption, cost per Unit produced, line OEE).
Machine state The signal that says what the machine is doing at a given moment: production, stop, setup, failure. It is the basis of the Availability calculation: see machine states.
Metrics The section of the application where you read a device's measurements, value by value, over time.
MTBF / MTTR Mean time between two failures (Mean Time Between Failures) and mean repair time (Mean Time To Repair). Two numbers that say whether a machine breaks down often and whether it gets back up quickly.
OEE Overall Equipment Effectiveness: the overall efficiency of a machine or a line, the product of Availability, Performance and Quality. See what OEE is.
Performance One of the three OEE factors: the actual production speed compared to the machine's nominal speed.
Periodic, counter-based, condition-based maintenance The three logics used to schedule an intervention: on a calendar deadline, on reaching a usage threshold, or when a measurement signals degradation. The differences are on the maintenance types page.
Planned time The time the machine was expected to be in production, defined by the shifts. It is the denominator of OEE and separates a planned stop from a loss.
Plant The grouping that represents a site or production location. It lets you read data per facility even when the company has more than one.
Profile The model describing which measurements to expect from a device type, with their units of measure. Equipment of the same model shares the same profile, so you do not start from scratch at every installation.
Quality One of the three OEE factors: the share of conforming Units out of the total produced.
TEEP Total Effective Equipment Performance: like OEE, but computed on total calendar time instead of planned time. It measures asset utilisation, not shift efficiency.
Telemetry The transmission of data from the field to the cloud. The term refers to the collection, not to what you read on screen.
Unit How much the machine has produced, counted in the quantity proper to the process: number of items, metres, kilograms, litres. In the OEE calculation it is the quantity Performance and Quality are measured on.