Working session · 18 May 2026 · Buffalo, NY

Engineering, controls,and AI.

What APT is shipping across the cheese and dairy stack today, and where the AI work fits.

Lactalis Buffalo · plant expansion working session

ConfidentialGreg McMillan · Sr. Process Engineer · APT

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Chapter 01

The
Demonstration.

GUS.ai on a working cheese vat. Then the architecture. Then where APT fits in the Buffalo project.

The reference deployment

GUS.ai running on a working cheese vat.

The deployment is live at an active customer site. The customer is anonymized in the UI, but the telemetry, the corpus, and the reasoning are real. What follows is how the architecture beneath it works.

Real · 01

Live telemetry

Real ACV historian, PLC interlocks, alarm history.

Real · 02

Real corpus

SOPs, drawings, manuals, recipes. Ingested and chunked.

Real · 03

Real agent

Claude tool-use loop, plant-scoped, every answer cites its sources.

Architecture

ADX. Plant floor to GUS.ai.

ADX edge gathers. ADX server stores. GUS.ai queries. Single outbound port from the plant network. ISA-95 hierarchy. The same architecture running today at the reference cheese plant.

Plant floor · ADX at the Edge

Ignition Edge + EventGateway

01
PLC / ControlLogix
Existing process controls. EventGateway speaks Allen-Bradley MSG instructions natively.
02
Ignition Edge IIoT
Time-series via Sparkplug B. Active/standby redundancy. Store-and-forward, no data loss.
03
EventGateway
APT-built microservice. Translates PLC data to JSON, publishes to MQTT.

Two production services in the standard deployment. Node-RED is also installed for prototyping but is not in the production data path. PLCTagWriter (the only ADX write-back path) is optional and only installed on explicit customer request.

MQTT + TLS · port 8883 outbound only · Sparkplug B payloads · no inbound firewall holes

APT cloud · ADX at the Server

HiveMQ, Chronicler, Museum

01
HiveMQ
MQTT broker. Receives the encrypted outbound stream. Industry-standard, swappable.
02
Chronicler
APT-built. Parses Sparkplug B, republishes flat MQTT, writes to Museum on ISA-95 path.
03
Museum
ADX data store. Built on TimescaleDB. Enterprise / Site / Area / Line / Workcell hierarchy.

GUS.ai queries Museum read-only via PostgreSQL. Encrypted at rest (AES-256, TigerData default).

Read-only PostgreSQL query into Museum · plant-scoped · citation-tracked

AI agent · queries ADX read-only

GUS.ai

01
Claude tool-use loop
14 read-only tools. 10-call budget per query. Plant-scoped reasoning across telemetry + corpus.
02
Citation-first answers
Every response cites its source: document page, telemetry tag, alarm definition, batch record, or dependency graph node.
03
No write path of any kind
GUS.ai cannot use PLCTagWriter, cannot modify Museum, cannot reach the PLC.

Tamper-evident audit log. SHA-256 hash chain on every record. Verifiable on demand.

Quote 19653 · APT scope at Buffalo

From the truck to the whey silo.
One vendor across the line.

APT is supplying or modifying every upstream process area in the expansion. One scope, one P&ID set, one schedule.

Receiving

4 bays + loadout, 4 Walker raw silos

Pasteurization

2 raw milk HTSTs + relocated separation HTST

Membranes

Skim MF + MF permeate UF

Mozz & Ricotta

Blend silos, mozz HTSTs, cream tanks

Whey

Mozz whey silos, ricotta whey tanks

Raw CIP · 4 tank, 5 pumpPasteurized CIP · 4 tank, 4 pumpSanitation across both

Live · Production ACV

Ask it anything.

A working cheese vat. A live production system. Ask it anything about the floor.

Connected·14 read-only tools·Tamper-evident audit

Chapter 02

The
Broader Work.

What else APT.ai is building. The portfolio that sits alongside GUS.ai.

Broader work · APT.ai portfolio

GUS.ai is the front door.
Here's what's behind it.

Each section below is a built-out topic deck covering the full capability, not a teaser. Click into anything for the deep dive.

ADX

The data infrastructure GUS.ai sits on. Edge to enterprise.

→02

Architecture

Three layers, fourteen tools, evidence mandatory.

→03

GUS Agile

AI-assisted agitator design — the engineering platform underneath GUS.ai.

→04

Omni

162 agents across a full cheese plant. Year-three vision.

→

IT & Security

Outbound only. Read only.

The architecture in three lines. Full detail on the IT & Security page.

Outbound MQTT/TLS only. No inbound ports.
Read-only at the OT layer. No write path, ever.
Tamper-evident audit. Data export on day one.

Walk the IT & Security page

What you walked through