When I was a "Techineer" I started using hardware and software tools to accurately tune PID loops. This experience is the basis for what facil.ai is capable of doing.
I understand the mission criticality of supervisory control (and Data Acquisition) - "SCADA" I was the Team Leader on one of Honeywell's most complex projects, the triple redundant Bank of America Data Centers. They were redundant at the building level. One in Los Angeles (the main one), with a backup in San Francisco and Concord. When that Central Plant went down for a sustained period, the losses were said to be $1 M per minute because their main frames, fed by our chilled water, were down. This is about as critical as it gets!
At the bank central plant I would routinely unpack my $10,000 loop "ProTuner". I flew around the country for Honeywell tuning loops. If tuning loops "remotely" equates to an embedded system controller in a plastic black case built by Rockwell, and then later embodied in an OPC compatible software package, then stretching out the "wire" to run over the web cannot be the issue? At Honeywell, among other things, I wrote my own PID loop tuner in C, running on my Dell 386 Engineering laptop. I wrote a software gateway (another first) to the legacy and proprietary Honeywell Delta 1000/2000 system. I put my $10,000 pro tuner back on the shelf. My software loop tuner could read and write directly to and from the BAS. It would plot (in DOS) a ten second interval graph of the control variable, analyze the loop characteristics, and change the PID parameters.
Tune the loop.
Over the wire.
"Remotely."
This was 1993.
I then wrote a second gateway to the Australian made Honeywell SCAN 3000 SCADA control system (by the way Honeywell would later market this solution in the United States as the Enterprise Buildings integrator or EBi). By the time I left Honeywell in 1994 to Johnson I had caught the attention of Honeywell Field Engineering in Arlington Heights. I was sponsored by my mentor and head of their Field Engineering Mike Gelon (who left Honeywell and went to startup Visio after we worked together on the industry's first Graphical Programming Language - GPL Engineering tool, but that's another story!). Mike and I developed the "ePID" that incorporated "fuzzy" logic, a (so-called) "self-tuning PID".
Most of my work leading up until now has been based on my work in the field as a Tech/Engineer. I did it back then working for the major controls companies, and I can certainly use modern technology to enhance the process now. facil.ai is most assuredly tuning loops from the cloud...among other things! Get in touch to learn about facil.ai's capabilities!