Articles and News

By Bill Lydon, Editor Automation Fair 2015 was described as a showcase of the latest advances in manufacturing and industrial automation enabled by the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). Here are highlights of a few interesting Encompass Partner products.

By Moazzam Shamsi, Emerson Process Management The self-configuring capabilities of WirelessHART networks simplify the installation and configuration of WirelessHART field devices. This article walks through the steps required to successfully install and configure a WirelessHART network.

Elite adds Vibration Monitoring and Profibus Network health checks to its support services.

By Jonathan Wilkins, European Automation Five years after the Stuxnet attack, all SCADA and PLC systems across the manufacturing industry are vulnerable, no matter how small.

January marks 15 years since the founding of the organization and the birth of the family of CC-Link open automation network technologies.

The OPC standard allows the EyeSens sensors and EyeVision software to function as OPC server.

The SmartWatchWeb Radio Frequency (SWWRF40) Steam Trap Monitor checks for gas and steam leaks, temperature, pressure and other relevant information related to valves and the steam system.

By Alan Grau, Icon Labs Securing IoT devices is a complex task. OEMs can reduce development cost and time to market by utilizing a security framework that provides key security features. The cost, time and complexity of developing a solution from scratch, or of integrating disparate open source solutions, far outweighs the cost of using a commercial solution.

By Punya Prakash and David Zaucha, Texas Instruments To date, the implementations of EtherCAT slave node have largely been dominated by hardware intensive solutions used to perform on-the-fly real-time processing and synchronization. Recent advances in technology have created programmable system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices that offer very tangible equipment costs savings, versatility and longer life cycles to industrial systems users.

By Joy Weiss, Dust Networks Wireless sensor networks must meet a high bar for smart, security and reliable wire-free operation over many years. These stringent requirements can be met with existing and emerging wireless mesh networks standards.

The global cable connectors and adapters market is estimated to reach a value of USD$85.75 bn by 2022. The market is projected to expand at a CAGR of 9.1% during the forecast period from 2015 to 2022.

The acquisition will enhance PTC’s portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, and accelerate the company’s entry into the factory setting and Industrial IoT (IIoT).

Radial basis network model produced better estimation capabilities than the back propagation and regression network models

The structured cabling market was valued at US$7.11 bn in 2014 and is expected to reach US$11.45 bn by 2021, at a CAGR of 7.1% from 2015 to 2021.

The ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute certified the STAPS ISA100 Wireless Steam Trap Monitor from Spirax Sarco.

By Wim Pessemier, KU Leuven Information modeling, or the ability to express not only data but also the meaning of data, is a key concept in the quest to make systems more intelligent, more autonomous and more evolvable.

ZigBee and EnOcean will combine EnOcean energy harvesting wireless solutions with ZigBee 3.0.

Patrick Gouhin delivered a keynote address entitled, “Utilizing an Operational Technologies Approach to Mitigating Cybersecurity Risk” at the Cybersecurity Conference in Raleigh, NC.

This specification describes the mapping of the Sercos information model to OPC UA so that functions and data of Sercos devices are made available and accessible via OPC UA.

The AIM ST6700 has successfully achieved ISA100 Wireless certification.