Articles and News

By Bill Lydon, Editor In January, Honeywell completed the acquisition of Elster for $5.1 billion. Elster is a leading provider of gas, water, and electricity measurement solutions used in commercial, industrial, and residential applications. Offerings include smart meters, software, and data analytic solutions.

Automation professionals must ensure that everyone understands the importance of cybersecurity for mission-critical operations.

By Bill Lydon, Editor ODVA believes EtherNet/IP is ideally positioned for the fourth industrial revolution and the world of integrated cyber physical systems. This article summarizes ODVA's initiatives for the process industries, Industry 4.0 and field device configuration/integration.

AutoQuiz: What is the recommended limit for the length of an Ethernet cable segment?

Most common technologies available for continuous level measurement are ultrasonic, free space radar, guided wave radar, capacitance, gamma, and pressure

By Bill Lydon, Editor Many industry experts believe OPC UA is an enabling technology for the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. OPC UA enables multivendor multiplatform secure reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise.

The market increasingly demands individualized products. Product life cycles are getting shorter and average lot sizes are getting smaller. Considering this, cost efficient production in a globalized and resource limited environment requires a highly flexible (IT-) infrastructure that also works well in cross-enterprise networks. It requires a reshaped automation data pyramid.

Demand for improved productivity & competitiveness will force companies to invest in new, innovative & connected ways to optimize plants & supply networks.

By Bill Lydon, Editor The industrial Ethernet protocols for automation were designed long before serious discussions about the IoT and IIoT. Existing industrial networks will need to transform before users can fully experience the benefits of IIoT implementations. This article highlights my observations related to this transformation.

AutoQuiz: error readings in pressure instrument calibration

By Manjish Naik, Meridium Use high accuracy metrics or sufficiently-good data to analyze asset performance as far as it will allow, while you keep improving processes and the quality of the rest of your data to make it sufficiently good.

By Dr. Wolfgang Martin, Wolfgang Martin Team Will it create more jobs than it destroys?

PLC Performance Enhancement by Field Programmable Gate Array Design

ISA's training and education opportunities in April 2016.

Hannover Messe is always an exciting and informative event which showcases products and innovations from around the world. This year, the theme is Integrated Industry and the United States will be the Partner Country. President Obama will be on hand to open and tour the fair with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

By Peter Thorne, Director, Cambashi New connectivity enables new data flows. New data flows trigger new ways of working. The changes that happened in production years (and in some cases, decades) ago can now happen in product development, driven by the new connectivity of Industry 4 and Internet of Things initiatives. This article explores Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) from the point of view of the design engineering process.

AutoQuiz: What is the MOST appropriate technique for modeling linear relationships for a large number of correlated inputs where the equations are unknown?

ATEX, IECEx and Class I Div 2 for CP10 and CD5 now available

Alarms keep production running smoothly and safely, but how can you cut through the clutter and respond in an effective way?

A lot of folks imagine the process of bringing a robot onto their production floor as, literally, bringing a robot in. Alternatively, you can assign a worker who will service the robot while contemplating a philosophical question: “Who works for whom? Does the robot work for me or do I work for the robot?”