1. The Problem

Challenge: Consolidate multi-site energy operations with heterogeneous equipment and multiple protocols, preserving local autonomy (history, alarms, synoptic) while enabling a unified corporate view (Energy Center), with high availability and point/tag scale.

Specific pain points:

Impact: Slow responses to energy events, engineering rework, and higher operational risk due to fragmented data.

Example: “Without a unified central network, the energy team had to manually correlate events and histories across areas, increasing MTTR.”

2. The Solution

2.1 Overview

2.2 Logical Diagram (high level

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  <text x="52" y="84" class="cap">[Operational Areas (15+)]</text>
  <text x="60" y="112" class="sub">• FrameworX Site (local)</text>
  <text x="60" y="136" class="sub">• Drivers: Altus / GE / Siemens / Rockwell / OPC DA</text>
  <text x="60" y="160" class="sub">• History & Alarms (standardized)</text>
  <text x="60" y="184" class="sub">• Per-area synoptic / Local operations</text>
  <text x="60" y="208" class="sub">• Store & Forward / Scripts</text>
  <text x="60" y="232" class="sub">• TCP/IP & Serial</text>

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  <text x="712" y="114" class="cap">FrameworX Enterprise (Central)</text>
  <text x="720" y="142" class="sub">• Area Consolidation</text>
  <text x="720" y="166" class="sub">• Corporate Hist/Alarms</text>
  <text x="720" y="190" class="sub">• Integrations (OPC/DB/APIs)</text>
  <text x="720" y="214" class="sub">• Redundancy (HA)</text>

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[Operational Areas (15+)]                                                [Energy Center]
 ?? FrameworX Site (local)                                          ?????????????????
  ?  • Drivers: Altus/GE/Siemens/Rockwell/OPC DA        ? FrameworX Enterprise (Central)     ?
  ?  • History & Alarms (standardized)                             ?  • Area Consolidation                       ?
  ?  • Per-area synoptic / Local operations                      ?  • Corporate Hist/Alarms                 ?     
  ?  • Store & Forward / Scripts                                         ?  • Integrations (OPC/DB/APIs)        ?
 ?? TCP/IP & Serial  ??????????????? ?  • Redundancy (HA)                       ?
                                                                                           ?????????????????
                                                                                                     ?
                                                                                  Clients (SC/Web/Mobile)


2.3 Topology

Layer

Component

Role

Notes

Area

FrameworX Site

Acquisition, history, alarms, HMI

Independent local operation; standardized models

Transport

TCP/IP, Serial

Telemetry and control

Network segmentation; QoS; serial/IP gateways

Central

FrameworX Enterprise

Consolidation, orchestration, APIs

Cross-area normalization; corporate dashboards

Data

Historian/DB

Corporate repository

Retention/partitioning strategy

Clients

SmartClient/WebAssembly

Operations & engineering

Multiple concurrent clients

2.4 Network Architecture

2.5 Redundancy & Failover

2.6 Protocols & Equipment

Drivers/Interfaces: Altus, GE, Siemens, Rockwell, OPC DA (legacy) and OPC UA (recommended) + serial/TCP drivers.
Channels: TCP/IP and serial (RS-232/RS-485 per equipment).

2.7 Scale & Capacity (confirm/validate)

2.8 Third-Party Integrations

Legacy OPC DA; gateways/proxies; DB connectors for corporate BI; APIs for maintenance/assets.

3. Key Enablers

Industrial multiprotocol (native drivers + OPC DA/UA)
Covers a heterogeneous ecosystem without heavy middleware.

Distributed solutions (Area/Central/Clients) with independent updates
Reduces maintenance windows and enables controlled rollback.

Standardized History and Alarms
Common model across areas; simplifies corporate KPIs/SLAs.

WebAssembly/HTML5 + SmartClient
Scalable operations and corporate access without fixed thin-client dependencies.

Enterprise redundancy (HA) and store-and-forward
Business continuity and data consistency under network/host failures.

Why wasn’t this trivial on other platforms?
Combination of broad multiprotocol coverage, distributed/independent deployment, unified alarms/history model, and corporate HA at 30k+ points.

4. The Results