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Industrial AI glossary

Plain-language definitions for facility systems, industrial networks, vision AI, commissioning and evaluation.

Last updated 15 September 2026 · Documentation version 2026.07

A practical reference for the systems and workflows described across Indagate industries.

Facility and control systems

DCIM — Data Center Infrastructure Management

Software and practices for monitoring and planning data center physical infrastructure, including power, cooling, rack space and capacity. DCIM connects IT demand to facility resources.

BMS — Building Management System

A system that monitors and controls building services, especially heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC). It may integrate lighting, energy metering and other systems; dedicated fire and life-safety controls retain their own authority.

BAS — Building Automation System

Automated monitoring and control of building services such as HVAC and lighting. BAS and BMS overlap substantially; usage varies by vendor and region.

SCADA — Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

An architecture for supervisory monitoring and control of industrial processes or distributed assets, combining telemetry, operator interfaces and communications with field controllers.

CMMS — Computerized Maintenance Management System

Software that organises maintenance work orders, schedules, asset records and service history.

Historian

A system optimised for storing and retrieving timestamped process measurements and events. It supports trend review and investigation alongside asset and maintenance records.

RTU — Remote Terminal Unit

A field device that gathers measurements and exchanges telemetry or control signals with a supervisory system, often at a remote site.

OT network — Operational Technology network

A network connecting systems that monitor or control physical processes, including controllers, sensors and actuators. OT networks may be segmented or isolated; they are not necessarily air-gapped.

Air-gapped

Physically isolated from other networks, including the internet. A firewall or network segment alone does not constitute an air gap.

Operations and infrastructure

PUE — Power Usage Effectiveness

Total data center energy divided by IT equipment energy over the same measurement period and boundary. PUE describes infrastructure energy overhead; it does not measure useful computing output.

Alarm fatigue

Reduced attention to alarms after repeated exposure to excessive, repetitive or non-actionable alerts. Alarm context and prioritisation help teams investigate the events that require action.

ILI — In-line inspection

Inspection of a pipeline from inside the pipe using an inspection tool, often called a smart pig, to gather evidence about its condition. ILI is the usual abbreviation, rather than IL.

Commissioning

A documented process of checking that installed systems perform against agreed design and operating requirements before acceptance.

Handover

Transfer of accepted systems and their asset information, test evidence, operating procedures and maintenance requirements to the operating team.

Vision and AI

Edge detection

Image processing that identifies boundaries through changes in image intensity. It can support shape or alignment checks; measurements also depend on lighting, calibration and camera geometry.

Classification

Assigning an image or region to a class, such as an acceptable or defective part. A confidence score is model-specific and should not automatically be treated as a calibrated probability.

Object detection

Identifying and locating objects in an image, commonly with bounding boxes and class scores. Tracking adds identity across successive frames, such as following a part along a conveyor.

VLM — Vision-language model

A model that processes visual and text inputs to answer questions or describe a scene. Its outputs require evaluation against the intended task and operating conditions.

VLA — Vision-language-action model

A model that combines visual and language inputs to produce action representations, such as robot actions or structured action plans. Outputs need validation and an authorised execution boundary; they do not by themselves authorise machine control.

Evaluation and commercial terms

POC — Proof of concept

A scoped evaluation that tests a proposed workflow against agreed data, success criteria and operating constraints before a production decision.

LOI — Letter of intent

A document recording the parties’ proposed commercial intent. Whether any provision is binding depends on its wording and applicable law; the label alone does not determine its effect.

Historian platforms and integration scope

Examples include AVEVA PI System (formerly OSIsoft PI), Honeywell Uniformance, Emerson DeltaV historians, Siemens WinCC archiving and AVEVA Historian (formerly Wonderware Historian).

These are examples of historian products, not a list of verified Indagate connectors. An ODBC interface or REST API can provide a route to data, subject to product version, licensing, authentication, network access, tag mapping, timestamps and data quality. Agree and validate access for each installation.

Further reading