Engie's Business Unit Generation Europe (BU Gen) has a generation capacity of 22GW. In 2006, the PI System was introduced in a limited number of power plants in Belgium. At first, it was considered a pure historian database with a background role. Over the years, it evolved to a business critical system, integrated with applications such as CEMS, BI, LIMS etc. In an effort to standardize interfacing with these domains, AF was used to create asset models that can be interpreted by custom IT systems. In parallel with the functional (r)evolution, the PI System also expanded geographically and became a standard application in other plants across Europe. Rising together with the impact of PI, IT support evolved to a higher level. Since this support has been provided from the start by an internal IT team, it created synergy opportunities as other Business Units within the Engie group now also rely on this in-house knowledge and their PI infrastructure is operated and serviced in a standard and consolidated manner.
Speaker
Bart Van Brabant
Mr. Bart Van Brabant began his career at Engie as a technical analyst within the Industrial Solution team of the IT department. With a passion for problem solving and forming the bridge between users and technology, he specialized in functional analysis and user support on the PI System and relational database systems and is currently leading the functional analysis activities within the Operational Technology team of the IS department within Engie's Business Unit Generation. He assisted in the design and integration of various OT systems with the PI System, such as LIMS and an emission monitoring system. Thereby focusing on the usage of AF as a modelling layer for applications. His educational background is in Bio-engineering and Bio-informatics.
Speaker
Olivier Martens
Mr. Olivier Martens started his career with Engie in 2006 as a Technical Analyst and gained over 5 years experience with the PI System. After that, he took up the Service Delivery Manager function within the IT department of Business Unit Generation, managing a small team (\"PI Competence Center\") to provide PI System related services throughout Europe.