Articles and News

By Paul Miller and Dick Hill, ARC Advisory Group Tuesday morning's general session for all forum tracks included presentations by Andy Chatha, ARC's President and Founder, Marty Edwards from the DHS Control Systems Security Program at Idaho National Laboratories (INL); Thomas Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation at Procter & Gamble; and Ralph Rio, Research Director, Enterprise Advisory Services here at ARC.

By Nathan Pocock, OPC OPC is still the connectivity standard for Process Control, for ADI, a part of FDI and FDT and STILL the connectivity standard for manufacturing, and PLCs. OPC is a Unified Architecture, and OPC is an Express Interface.

The capabilities of PLCs and weight controllers are maximized and costs reduced when a strong bidirectional interface is used. The PLC is capable of performing a variety of tasks, but a wiser (and now easier) solution is to offload some functions to a dedicated weight controller.

There is no doubt that the global competitive landscape has changed over the past few years. As emerging economies continue to grow and their demand for consumer products increases, new suppliers will sprout up within those economies to help local manufacturers meet those demands. Those suppliers and manufacturers could, and likely will, be your next competitors. Of course, there are challenges to being global, including geography, language and finances. Hannover Messe help you navigate the “unknown waters.”

Evaluation Engineering, January 2010 By David Owen, Pickering Interfaces Article has case histories and gives selection advice on the two most common platforms for switching systems, PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) and LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI).

By Jako Winter, Metacom An automated electrical distribution automation network in Rawsonville, South Africa, proved its worth when a line fault briefly affected power supply to farms and packing houses in the area. Power was restored to 75% of these customers in 90 seconds.

By Jim McMahon, Dematic Capable of building mixed-case pallets from an inventory of over 10,000 SKUs, the latest evolution in Automated Mixed-Case Palletizing represents an advance in case palletizing.

By Ed Romaine, KardexRemstar The movement and storage of tooling and dies can represent a significant portion of the cost of production. Here's how to select a vertical storage system.

by Don Frey, ISA Volunteer Leader Faced with unprecedented declines in demand for training, advertising, and exhibit space, the ISA has had to make drastic cuts in its budget for 2010. Some significant areas where cuts have been made are in the areas of professional staff, frequency of publication of InTech magazine, ISA E-News production and distribution, and future ISA EXPO offerings.

The main reason you wish your product releases to be published on an online site like Automation.com is to generate sales leads and send traffic to your web site. Therefore, it's important to write your headline and first paragraph so that (a) web site editors know what it is and will want to publish it and (b) once published, it can easily be found by search engines.

White papers have become a popular online marketing tool of the times as they introduce a company's innovative products and demonstrate a company's strengths. Whether a paper is used for lead generation, education, customer retention or to close sales, the first step is making it attractive to your target audience.

By Rick Zabel, Publisher Have you ever wished you could look back at what your operator was seeing at some point in history? Now you can. The Console Recorder from Longwatch is a virtual time machine - a software package that lets companies see what the operator was watching on the HMI when an event occurred.

By Bill Lydon, Automation.com PLCopen finalized release 2.1 of the PLCopen Technical Committee 6 – XML Standard. This release 2.1 is based version 2.0 published in December 2008, as well as the feedback received from PLCopen members and the AutomationML organization. Here’s a synopsis of what the standard contains.

There's an old saying, "Necessity is the Mother of Invention." A number of experts have said that the United States has lost its edge – its ability to innovate. Kamen believes that inventions in the U.S. have not slowed down. However, Kamen says, "Our society has become more cautious and we don't accept new innovations as quickly."

Solid-state relays (SSR) are able to perform many of the same tasks as electromechanical relay (EMR)s. The main difference is that SSRs have no moving mechanical parts within it.

Automation.com, August 2009 By: Christopher Eckert & Attilio Bellman, Siemens IT Solutions & Services Plant managers require IT solutions that support production lines, just-in-time scheduling and demand planning. However, forecasting and demand planning is not standard in today's IT and manufacturing environments.

As I travel from one user conference to another, there is one clear and consistent theme coming from the major automation suppliers. Services, which include systems integration, optimization, life cycle management, asset management, and maintenance, have become a major focus for many of them. Even in this challenging economy, the services groups within these organizations continue to grow – sometimes significantly.

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As an engineer, you may not think you could learn anything about innovation from a former travel agent. But this former travel agent was the founder of Travelocity.com, one of the few profitable dotcoms during the dotcom bust. Jones referred to Wikipedia's definition of the word innovation - a new way of doing something that ultimately creates value to a producer or customer.

ProfiBus was created in 1989 by the German government in cooperation with several manufacturers of automation equipment. It is a messaging format specifically designed for high-speed serial I/O in factory and building automation applications.