Articles and News

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor OPC UA technology provides an efficient and secure infrastructure for communications and has the potential to be the standard of choice to complete the vision of IP to the edge, commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things."

Automation.com, October 2012 By Nuris Ismail and Reid Paquin This research explores how industry leaders are taking advantage of industrial networking to enable real-time visibility into data to optimize production, maintenance, and safety - in particular, the adoption rate of industrial Ethernet protocols versus Fieldbus.

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Executives from supplier and end-user companies, along with a leading industrial business analyst provided their insights into the future of automation and industry issues, including human performance and challenging new engineers.

Estimate benefits from a decrease in variability & an increase production rate. Implement solutions where an increase in plant profitability is justified

Technical paper presents a new method for designing predictive controllers for linear single-input/single-output systems.

Buying high-quality instrumentation does not mean that the buyer has to pay list price.

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Clemens Blum and Mary Ramsey discussed how Schneider Electric is taking a more holistic view on operations and helping customers meet energy efficiency and sustainably goals by making investments in open architecture platforms and web services.

By Mark Howard, Zettlex Potentiometers are still, by far, the most commonly used position sensor. They are widely seen as the low cost solution for many position sensing applications. But is their reputation for low cost justified?

ISA Fall and Spring Leader meetings are always something to be experienced.

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor The goal of Intuition Executive is to integrate and manage information that companies typically house in applications and spreadsheets, allowing them to manage complex production operations, monitor processes and make operating decisions.

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Nathalie Marcotte suggested that attendees expand their view on modernization by not just thinking about the DCS, but the need to modernize the entire plant and operations.

InTech, October 2012 By Rick Zabel While job satisfaction remains high (79.9%), this year’s survey indicates salaries are on the rise—up a respectable 4.4% over last year. This rise is indicative of the noticeable increase in the demand for qualified automation professionals.

Automation.com, October 2012 By Patrick Supanich, Contributing Writer Over the past year, a number of PROFINET technology developments and organizational structure changes have occurred. First, the release of specification Version 2.3 that covers applications from standard to high speed processes. Second, called performance upgrade, has dramatically increase the speed of the PROFINET network.

By Peter Seeberg and Jürgen Lange, Softing OPC specifications are created with the aim of permitting interoperability between products from different manufacturers. To ensure that a product actually complies with the specification it must undergo a series of compliance tests. Part 6 in a series of eight articles.

Remote Access, Any Time, Any Place

Automation.com, October 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor It is hard to find another platform with the computing power and rapid prototyping capabilities of LabVIEW coupled with NI hardware. Because it comes at a price, their products are used in demanding industrial automation applications out of the reach of typical industrial controllers.

An enhanced PID can simplify the tuning and improve the stability for loops with large and/or variable analyzer update times.

ISA would like to extend a special Thank You to our Partners for their support of ISA Automation Week, the organization and the global automation community.

By Bridget Fitzpatrick Track: Human Performance Bridget Fitzpatrick from Wood Group Mustang presented on the topic of Human Factors Engineering (HFE) in the context of Automation projects. The talk centered around defining HFE and providing an overview of how it applies to automation projects.

By Nikki Bishop Track: Asset Performance Wireless instruments, asset monitoring algorithms, and the combination of the two serves as a gateway to overall improvements in plant reliability, allowing operations to take advantage of market conditions to maximize profitability.