Ability Platform Glossary

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ABB Ability™ platform

The ABB Ability™ Platform is a set of common digital enabling technologies that are used to build the ABB Ability Solutions. From a technical standpoint, ABB Ability™ Platform is built on top of Microsoft Azure services that are customized to fulfill the needs of common Industrial IoT solutions. From a business context, ABB Ability™ Platform enables rapid development of IIoT solutions reliably and securely. This leads to a faster Go to Market.

ABB Ability™ solution

An ABB Ability™ solution can either be a product or service that contains hardware augmented with software. This product/service can then be sold to solve specific customer problems:  Robotics, a connected drive, smart sensors, etc. The product/service is then sold to external customers as a subscription or one time purchase.

Ability Edge

The Ability Edge is an on-premise gateway solution that provides reliable and secure connectivity for industrial devices cloud computing needs. Please note that Ability Edge follows an open and modular architecture for building and deploying business critical solutions at the Edge. For more information, refer to the Edge Overview page.

Ability Information Modelling

As the name implies, its a domain specific information Modelling service which can help developers and solution architects to define virtual representations of devices, processes, locations, etc. This a fundamental aspect of the ABB Ability Platform, which allows for high level applications to apply structure and meaning to the Telemetry Data that is being received from the field.

Analytics

The discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

APC

Advanced Process Control – a broad range of analytical techniques and technologies that provide model based optimization.

API

Acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. ABB Ability Platform provides APIs to allow for secure programmatic access to the Platform. For more information, refer to the Ability APIs page.

Architectural Control Point

Technology that essentially controls, coordinates or prioritizes everything inside a system. This technology allows ABB to pull more value from that data and to disrupt others that are trying to supply value to the other pieces of that system.

Azure

Microsofts public cloud computing platform.

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Cloud

An approach where information technology capacities (such as storage, processing or applications) are separated from the individual computer and are supplied through an Internet based service at the user’s demand. The “as-​a-Service” moniker is sometimes used for cloud computing services, such as Software-​as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-​as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-​as-a-Service (IaaS). The backend for the ABB Ability™ Platform.

Cloudera

An open source data management system for the Hadoop cloud computing platform.

Connectivity

The ability to exchange information between devices and systems using known communications protocols.

CPM

Collaborative Production Management. A term coined by ARC Consulting to describe the space above the control system and below the enterprise.