Bangkok Industrial Gas (BIG) is a joint venture founded in 1987 by Thai investors and led by Bangkok Bank PCL and Air Products and Chemicals Inc. Today, BIG is leading the innovative integrated gas industry in Thailand with the largest production capacity of liquefied gas and highest market share in pipeline transportation systems and trucks for customers in various industries. BIG also produces a wide range of gases including oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, helium, mixed gases, and specialty gases, as well as provides engineering & design services. 

Over the last few years, BIG has been a strong AspenTech advocate — deploying Aspen InfoPlus.21^® (Aspen IP.21), to collect and store large volumes of real-time and historical data, and Aspen Mtell^® to analyze the failure probability pattern of assets — enabling proactive planning for maintenance.  

Recently, BIG started an initiative to leverage AWS Cloud technology for plant data retrieval and storage, replacing their in-house plant database. Moving historian data to the cloud would enable BIG to aggregate data from various sources, leverage the insights for plant improvement and commercial purposes, and implement advanced applications of machine learning (ML) and process control (APC). Accordingly, BIG started looking for solutions to make the plant data available in the AWS Cloud. 

One of the main challenges in transferring process data to the cloud is the time, cost and the highly-skilled workforces required to organize and maintain tags and collection rates. Aspen Connect™, as a powerful data connectivity solution, equips enterprises with the ability to read from, and write to, a wide variety of data sources, databases and historians with an easy and quick configuration. It moves historical data or streams live data with native Aspen IP.21 connectivity for encrypted high-speed data transfers; provides out-of-the-box connectivity for OSIsoft, SQL Server, CSV files, OPC UA, etc., and premium connectivity for stream-processing, data lakes, and cloud providers for big data analytics and reporting purposes (see the graphic below). Aspen Connect utilizes routes for moving data with up to 10,000 data points per route. 

Aspen Connect Provides a Diverse Library of Classic and Modern Connectors

BIG identified Aspen Connect as a robust solution to resolve the challenges of moving Aspen IP.21 data to the AWS Cloud. Through a successful pilot testing, Aspen Connect demonstrated its ease of use and solved the scalability problem of previous migration efforts. Leveraging Aspen Connect enabled BIG to transfer operational data to the AWS Cloud with maximum performance, security and flexibility while reducing complexity and the total cost of ownership for AWS Cloud connectivity. 

(Image source: Bangkok Industrial Gas)