Trending (Historic Data Logging)

TrendingGeneric trend logs are technology-independent and allow the recording of historic data values over time. The recording of data point values occurs at fixed intervals, on a defined change-of-value, or is triggered by a trigger data point. Recording intervals can be aligned to the wall-time. For example, different trend logs with 15 minutes intervals can record synchronously aligned to the top of the hour. For each data point, a change-of-value condition can be defined on the LOYTEC device. Trends operate independently of the underlying communication technology (CEA-709, BACnet, DALI, M-Bus, Modbus, KNX, etc.) or the underlying, physical data point of a L-IOB I/O Module. Trend logs can record local and remote data points of other, distributed devices. The capacity of a trend log and the storage mode (linear or ring buffer) can be configured. Devices that support SD cards and have a USB port also allow the storage of trend log data on external memory. The time of backing up trend logs can be triggered by the user on the LCD display or by defined, automatic trigger conditions.

LOYTEC devices with a BACnet interface can also use BACnet trend log objects for historic data recording. These objects can be accessed over the BACnet network and expose trend data to other BACnet devices and operator workstations (OWS). Each BACnet trend log object can record data for a single data point only. The recorded data point is limited to the BACnet technology, either to a local BACnet object or to a remote BACnet object (configured by a client mapping).

LOYTEC devices for LonMark Systems (CEA-709) use generic trend logs. There exists no LonMark functionality that allows transparent LonMark access to trend log data.

Trend log data of the different trend log objects can be displayed by LWEB‑900, LWEB‑802/‌803 and L-VIS. Trend data can be viewed either in a table view or in a trend graph. In addition, the LWEB‑900 server allows long-term storage of the historic trend data. For doing so, the recorded data is periodically read out from the device and stored in a database. If no permanent IP connection should exist between the L-WEB server and the respective LOYTEC devices, the devices can be configured to send trend data automatically as an e-mail attachment to the L-WEB server. Trend data can also be exported as a CSV file (via FTP access), or stored to SD card or USB memory, if the device supports it.

For certain applications, historic values of a given base data point, both recent and far into the past, can be of interest. This can be accomplished with historic filters. They allow processing historic values of the base data point according to a filter function. One or more such functions can be defined per base data point. The result of the historic filter is written to “historicFilter” property relations. For each historic filter function, a time period can be defined at which the base value is sampled, e.g., every first of the month at midnight, and how many samples ago. Historic filters can be created for any analog, binary, or multi-state data point. It is not necessary to create a trend log.