Adding a new system

Defining a new system is easy. Simply click on the +Add button. Thereafter, the following dialog will pop up:

General

Enter the basic system details in the General tab:

Name

The name of the OT system

ID

The identifier of the system, as it may be used in existing documentation. Usually the ID is less self-explanatory than the system name. Note that the system ID must be unique, while the system name does not.

Process

Here you can identify the physical process that this system executes (for example, packaging), assuming that you have already defined physical processes in INVENTORY/EXTENDED.

Process Location

The physical location of the controlled process. This may be different from the location of the OT devices controlling the process. For example, the controlled process might be somewhere out in the field, whereas the OT devices are located in a cabinet inside a building.

Description

A description of what the OT system does. For example: "Candy bar packaging"

System Group

A group that the system is a member of. Available groups are defined by the OTbase system administrator. Usually you will find something like "Final product", "Safety", "Support system" etc.

Criticality

You can assign a criticality to a system, allowing you to highlight the importance of proper system function. Criticalities are used in the same way as with individual devices. System criticality will be inherited by devices associated with a system, unless you have already specified a dedicated criticality for individual devices.

Image

A picture that will be displayed in the header of the system profile. For final product systems you may want to use a product picture for easy identification of the system.

Tags

Here you can add tags to the system, which will yield additional filtering capabilities.

Extended

You can assign custom data fields to the OT system. The fields that you have previously defined in INVENTORY/EXTENDED for Systems will be listed and can be populated with values.

Files

You can attach any files to the system, which will be exposed and made available for download in the System Profile.

Devices

This section is disabled when adding a new system.

System Relations

You can create relations between systems, in order to document dependencies and the overall inter-connection of systems. Relations may be logical or physical.

In order to define relations, first click on the Add button in the System Relations section of the pop-out dialog, and then enter one or more relationships. A relationship may have a direction, or it can be bidirectional. Then, you specify the system with which this relationship is held: you can pick from a list of systems already defined.

Next, you can specify a relation group. You can define relation groups by going to INVENTORY/EXTENDED. Some relationship groups are defined already, but they just act as a default and can be changed. Relationship groups allow you to define not just color codes but also line styles. With these capabilities, you can create extremely striking visualizations of system dependencies

After you have selected a group, you may want to specify a concrete description for the relation. If you leave this field empty, the relation group name is used as a label for the relation in the system definition dialog. If you provide a description, it is used in place of the more generic group name.

OTbase will automatically generate diagrams for your system relationships that are inserted in the system profiles.

Note that the diagrams are interactive. For nested systems you can collapse and expand subsystems, and you can also specify which relation types to expose and which ones not to expose (depending on the use case at hand).

For even more diagramming capabilities, you can open the system relations diagram (without all the other system details) in a separate pop-up browser window. Here you also have the opportunity to export the diagram, for example to Visio.

Nested systems

You can define system hierarchies, which is especially useful for documenting sub-systems of a larger system. For example, for a power plant you may want to document that the plant has two units, each of which consisting of a heat generation and a turbine part, along with a couple of other subsystems.

In order to do this simply select an existing system and then click on +Add. This will create a new subsystem for the selected system. In a nutshell, this works similar to locations, where you can create location hierarchies in the same way. Just like with locations, you can also adjust the position of a given system or subsystem in the hierarchy by using the drop-down in the top line of the slide-in.

Associating devices with a system

So far, your new system doesn't have any devices associated with it. In order to change this, go to INVENTORY/DEVICES. In the device list, select the devices that you want to associate with the system. Note that you can select more than one device by using Shift-Left Click and Control-Left Click.

When you have selected the devices that belong to your system, click on Edit. In the bulk edit dialog that now opens you can associate all selected devices with a system in a single operation. Select your system in the drop-down menu that appears in the OT System field, it lists all systems defined in INVENTORY/SYSTEMS. Thereafter, click on Save.