Opportunities of OLAP in Industrial Analysis

On-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data warehousing technologies has been accepted in business community as indispensable tools of effective data usage. Contemporary industrial process are as complex as the ones in the business field. OLAP techniques may be utilized in management of industrial process once there are implementations satisfying strident timing requirements of industrial process management. A summary of the state of the art of OLAP and data warehousing is included. Research directions in the field are also reviewed. Current research efforts concentrate on the model issues and on discovery of general and scaleable aggregate calculation algorithms. In the related works, no dynamics or real-time behavior of the underlying process model is usually considered. Significant OLAP and data warehousing products are surveyed. The products typically also make use of batch-oriented (static) data warehouse consolidation. Lastly, the requirements imposed on OLAP by industrial environments are discussed. The primary requirement is a capability to maintain the summary data levels (data cubes of aggregates values) up to date at all times. Temporal aspects have also to be taken into account, as industrial process data form time series. Missing values have to taken care of, too. Preliminary implementation idea are presented to cope with the stated requirements .