Artificial Cycles

What are artificial cycles

Sometimes, when retrieving cycle data from monitors there may be missing information. For example, a monitor may send information about cycles 2000, 2001 and 2002 and then skip over to cycles 2005 and 2006. When this happens, ProFile will temporarily stop processing cycle data for that monitor, waiting for the missing cycles to be sent. If these are not sent, ProFile will create information to fill that gap by generating the missing cycles, using the average interval of other cycles within that timeframe. The cycles created this way are called artificial cycles.

When this gap exceeds a certain number of cycles, an alert is reported for the asset to which the monitor is connected.

Impact

Artificial cycles are included in KPI calculations as if they were regular cycles. These are always considered to be active cycles, so if the missing cycle data would have actually indicated a downtime or sleeping state, that information is lost.

Typically having a few missing cycles every once in a while should not have a big impact on the displayed KPI values, but missing cycle data very often or having large cycle gaps can make the KPI values unreliable as they end up including a lot of extrapolated data and may even indicate an issue with the monitor or gateway that is sending the incomplete data.

Identifying artificial cycles

Whenever ProFile creates these cycles, these are flagged to differentiate them from trusted cycle data received from the monitors. In the application these are higlighted in an asset's cycle time report. To see them:

1. Navigate to an asset with realtime cycle data from either the dashboard screen or asset list screen
2. Select Cycle Time under Reports on the right side of the screen

Trusted cycle data is reported via green bullets. Artificial cycles instead use red bullets. When the interval is greater than cycle, the tooltip for the red bullets also shows how many artificial cycles are part of the aggregate data for that point.