Extend Support for PI's Advanced Calculation Engine (ACE)

Hi team, I’m glad to hear the PI SDK is backwards compatible, but I’m equally surprised and sad to see PI ACE is no longer supported going forward, especially with the uncertainty of whether PI ACE can run on the latest Windows Server OS’s (currently 2016 R2) and .NET framework. Our business requirements are met and strictly depend on PI ACE's capabilities since we need: • Full control over the timestamping of events, • Recalculation scheduling using both: o .bat scripts for periods past, and o Manual recalculations via PI ACE Manager, • Loops, array and lists to be used in the calculations, • Integration with our own custom libraries, and • Redundancy for the primary calculation server. We have attempted to rationalise our current calculation library to see if it can be implemented in PI AF and unfortunately the requirements outlined above are not met, thus identifying some serious gaps for the system’s transition from ACE to AF, and raising concerns around the longevity of our partnership with OSIsoft. The PI Historian is a great product that we’ve used for close to 8 years now, but I feel that if our business starts to suffer from calculation issues in the future, the key benefits of using OSIsoft for: • Having all data historized and queried efficiently, • Calculation data seamlessly integrated, and • Calculated data stored in one auditable system will no longer apply, thus leaving us with no other choice but to move to a different vendor. Hopefully we're not the only ones feeling this way and the OSIsoft community agrees in that PI ACE is invaluable and should be re-evaluated for ongoing support into the future, at least until PI AF’s SDK can close the gaps it has with PI ACE. Thank you, Marios Gerges Business Systems Analyst