Overview

Entities are plant assets that are used for the production, consumption, and storage of goods. An entity can be a building, a location in a building, a production line, or a single machine. The entity model for the MES application is driven by the plant model in the ArchestrA Galaxy. You can create a logical representation of entities and applications objects in the ArchestrA IDE to control and monitor production activities on a plant floor.
The Operations Capability Object is an ArchestrA automation object that allows you to configure entities to perform the following tasks:

• Start, stop, and run jobs
• Record the amount of material that is produced or consumed while executing a job
• Store and transfer inventory items
• Load, upload, and download job specifications

You can add the Operations Capability Object under an application object in the ArchestrA IDE and configure it. The configured Operations Capability Object attributes are used by the Entity Model Builder to create an entity in the MES database corresponding to the application object. The created entity can be used to perform different operations as per the information configured in the Operations Capability Object.

The Operations Capability Object extends the ArchestrA IDE equipment model to trigger events and log associated data into the MES database.

This includes material events related to material consumption, material production, and material movement, as well as status events related to equipment, production data, and personnel.
Before configuring the Operations Capability Object, you must import the aaPKG file. By default, this file can be located at C:\Program Files\Wonderware\MES\AppObjects.

MES Entity Model Builder

The Entity Model Builder is an ArchestrA IDE extension for creating entities from your ArchestrA equipment model that uses the Operation Capability object to configure job execution and storage execution capabilities

The installation of Entity Model Builder also provides you the capability to export existing ArchestrA users and roles to create corresponding Wonderware MES users and groups. Although Entity Model Builder is not a comprehensive user/role synchronization tool, it provides the convenience to avoid reentering each ArchestrA user/role into the MES database.

Creating Entities

The Entity Model Builder creates new entities and new entity hierarchies that do not exist. The Entity Model Builder can reparent an existing entity if the hierarchy is different in the ArchestrA IDE. It can also update an existing entity. To delete an entity you must delete it from Configurator.

When you contain an Operations Capability Object under an application object in the ArchestrA IDE Model View, the Entity Model Builder creates an entity for all the parent application objects and area objects as depicted in the Model view. Therefore, the basic equipment structure in the Galaxy is created with the intention of duplicating the same structure in the MES database.

If Wonderware MES already has an entity created in the database, the Entity Model Builder overwrites the entity information with the new configured information in an Operations Capability Object when you run the Entity Model Builder. The Entity Model Builder does not delete an existing entity or remove any capabilities. It can reparent entities at any level to reflect new structural changes to the ArchestrA equipment model hierarchy. Additional exports check the JobExec configuration in the ArchestrA Equipment model and in the MES Entity model. If there are any differences, the MES configuration is updated to match the ArchestrA configuration.

The new entity model is defined in the database with the same structure as the ArchestrA IDE model view. The job execution and storage information is extracted from the Operations Capability objects and stored in the corresponding entities. An application object can contain only one Operations Capability Object.