Articles and News

Under the terms of the agreement, Kay-EE has the right to market and manufacture products using Duraswitch electronic switch technologies. Guangzhou Kay-EE Membrane Keyboard Switch Co. (Kay-EE) is one of the largest suppliers of membrane switch panels in mainland China.

Invensys broke ground for a brand new, 15,500 square foot regional headquarters facility in South East Calgary. It will be twice as large as the present Calgary facility and will have three times the staging area to accommodate staging, testing, and verification of customers' automation systems.

ICONICS received the Microsoft ISV Trailblazer Partner of the Year Award.

Strong economic activity in Asia is spurring the growth of manufacturing, which in turn is propelling the growth of the automation market in the region. The Asian market for Distributed Control Systems (DCS) is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.0% over the next five years, according to a new ARC Advisory Group study.

A committee of industry leaders and academia met at ISA headquarters to begin work on the learning objectives for an automation engineering curriculum for universities. "Our goal is to develop curriculum content for a 4-year automation engineering degree program," said committee chair Randy Buchanan of the University of Southern Mississippi.

According to the study, 83% of respondents had outsourced some or all of NPD activity, confirming that outsourcing of core product development is extremely important in today’s market.

Honeywell has been awarded a $7 million contract to implement an Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) and FOUNDATION Fieldbus solution at a new chemical plant operated by Kuwait Paraxylene Production Company (KPPC). The plant will produce aromatics materials, mainly paraxylene for exportation and benzene that will be used in other regional projects.

Extio remote graphics units (RGUs) have been selected by ABB Automation Technologies for integration in the new ABB System 800xA Extended Operator Workplace, which provides a broad view of production processes to control room operators.

The resulting company, known as OA International bv, is a 200+ employee global automation solutions provider. Martin F. Wieffering, former CEO of KSE Protech is now OA International's Chief Executive Officer & Chairman.

Emerson will engineer, project manage, install, commission, and provide long term support on automation solutions for the company's oil, gas and petrochemical facilities in Qatar.

Telvent is participating in a collaborative exercise with the U.S. Department of Energy's National SCADA Test Bed (NSTB) on a joint security assessment project. NSTB researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) assess and mitigate the threats posed by cyber attacks on critical infrastructure control systems.

Invensys Process Systems becomes a global reseller and certified implementer for Transpara's Visual KPI operations intelligence software. Visual KPI technology helps customer plant personnel remotely monitor process variables and KPIs from their existing mobile communications devices.

ABB will supply burner management, boiler controls, and BOP controls for two 330 MW circulating fluidized bed boilers at Cleco Power's new $1 billion Rodemacher Power Station, a 660 MW generating unit near Boyce, LA. ABB will provide System 800xA with operator stations, Harmony Bridge controllers for monitoring and control, and PLC interfaces to the turbine controls via standard OPC technology.

Xycom Automation is adopting Pro-Face as its new corporate name. Xycom will remain a product brand name fully supported in the Pro-face family of Operator Interface and Industrial PC products.

ATS Electronics will distribute signal conditioners from BASI Instruments and Industrial Process Instrumentation and Display Units from Amalgamated Instruments in the United States and Canada.

The site contains videos, quick-start product guides and a library of code that help customers reduce the complexity of selecting, designing and configuring control systems. The site includes tools such as CompactLogix System Quick Start, an easy-to-understand guide designed to help reduce the time and cost associated with engineering, configuration and installation of a midsize control system.

Greg Chandler has been appointed President and CEO, and Ralph Damato was appointed Vice President, Product Management. Chandler was a founding member of Nematron in the early 1980s. Previously, Damato developed and marketed industrial computers and flat panel monitors for Xycom Automation.

Had trouble contacting your favorite automation vendor this week? That’s because Austin, Texas, otherwise known as the Silicon Hills and home to Indusoft and several major automation vendors, was hit by a winter storm on Monday, January 15, which essentially shut down the entire city and its automation industry for three days.

ARC is predicting that the HMI software market is going to experience double or near double digit growth over the next two years, with growth slowing over the following three years. The HMI software services market is expected to grow faster than the total HMI Software market over the next five years.

An inventory, navigation and picking system, integrated by Primary Marking, combines Intermec 750 mobile computers and SF51 scanners with Genesta's SyVox speech recognition software. The combination increases productivity without sacrificing the accuracy of scanning. Primary Marking also developed custom interface software that allows the collected data to go directly into Lighthouse for the Blind's ERP system.