Terminology

This page explains the meaning of some terms common to all MDA components.

Overview

Measurements Terms

Measurement Tour / Measurment Round

A measurement tour specifies a recurring "round trip" type of walk covering specific sensors. It is a list of the sensors to read in the order they usually are taken.

Examples:

• a tour covering the start-counters of all fluid pumps in a plant
• a tour visiting all water gauges along a river, reading the water depths
• a walk covering all measurement points in a specific building

Measurement Point

A measurement point is one station on a measurement tour. Think of a row in a table presentation of a measurement round.

Examples:

• start counter of water pump 13
• water depth at water gauge 42
• flow rate through overrun 0815

Measurement Profile

The measurement profile specifies what is measured at a type of measurement points, and how it is measured. If a computation lies between raw value(s) and result, the computation is also specified in the measurement profile.

Examples:

• number of starts (a single integer read from a counter)
• flow rate computed using the amount (raw value V in liters) of fluid collected in some kind of container and the length of time (raw value T in seconds) it took to collect this amount of fluid. Flow rate = V/T in l/s.

Measurement / Sensor

A single measurement means determining a single raw value, like reading the output of a single sensor or measuring a distance.

Completing the measurement activity for a measurement point with a complex measurement profile may require 2 or more measurements or sensor reads.

Infrastructure Tree / Site Tree

The site tree describes the concrete geographical and physical infrastructure of an organzation in a hierarchical manner.

In MDA's master data, measurement points are assigned to the site they are located at.

Example:

• Production area north
  
  • Power plant A
    
    • Building 1
      
      • Control room 
        
        • Control cabinet A1-001 (Related measurement points: electric meter 10001, electric meter 10002, thermometer 10003)
        • Control cabinet A1-011 (Related measurement points: electric meter 10101, electric meter 10102)
      • Pump  room (Related measurement points: starts of main pump 321, starts of backup pump 322)
    • Building 2
      
      • ...
  • Transformation station 7
    
    • ...
  • Transformation station 9
    
    • ...
• Production area south
  • ... 

Terms for People and their Roles

Employee

In MDA an employee is a person allowed to enter measurement data using the client application running on mobile devices. This includes the officers responsible for measurement data aquisition as well as apprentices just beeing learning to walk measurement rounds.

Employee Group

An employee group is a list of employees that share responsibility for measurements a specific part of the organization's infrastructure.

Examples:

• All measurement readers working in a certain power plant, valley, metropol region, county, ...
• All measurement readers allowed to access top-level nodes of a distribution network

MDA Officer (Clerk)

These terms refer to humans with a personal computer and permission to use the web interface of the MDA server.

Large organizations may chose to separate leading officers allowed to perform all administration tasks offered by the MDA server, and regular branch officers and clerks only allowed to manage measurement activities in their respective area.