Articles and News

Understand the choices for industrial communication protocols for most applications.

The new webpage highlights distributors of automation products.

At Automation Fair, Festo is introducing an innovative suite of safety products, including its new CIP safety module.

If TCP/IP won the “protocol wars” in the ‘90s, why are you still fighting protocol battles on the plant floor today?

The collaboration promises to simplify integration of OT and IT systems by optimizing process automation end users’ management of data from field devices.

Industry veteran Tom Weingartner brings Industrial Ethernet experience and broad perspective.

To support the spread and interoperability of PROFINET over TSN, PI has launched a PROFINET community stack project.

PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) is making an active contribution in this area and is committed to comprehensive and practicable standardization of industrial communication, which is continuously evolving in line with progress in implementation, but also with the technologies used.

PI North America, the non-profit member-supported trade association for promoting industrial networking technologies in North America, has signed a contract with the IO-Link Community, on behalf of the PROFIBUS Nutzerorganisation (PNO) to become a Regional IO-Link Interest Group (RIOLIG) for North America.

70% smaller Ethernet interface offers miniaturisation potential for PROFINET users.

PI North America, the non-profit member-supported organization for PROFIBUS, PROFINET, IO-Link, and omlox technologies in North America, is excited to launch a brand new PROFIBUS Online Training Course.

With currently 37 members, the number of founding members in November 2019 has more than quintupled even before its first birthday. Clear tendency: More and more members are joining every week.

This specification describes a standardized OPC UA object model for PROFINET devices which enables PROFINET devices from a wide variety of different manufacturers to transfer device data to asset management systems in a standardized way, for example. Standardization makes information collection significantly easier for tool manufacturers, regardless of the manufacturer, but this is just the beginning of PI’s vertical integration strategy.

As an independent supplier of solutions for industrial communication and the Industrial Internet of Things, HMS has an insight into the industrial network market. Here are some of the trends they see within industrial communication in 2019.

By Bill Lydon, Automation.com The Ford Livonia plant incorporated an automated transmission production line which illustrated the advantages and results of digitalization based on Ford’s goal of applying solid logic, planning, and execution to “be the number one transmission manufacturer in the world.”

FieldComm Group and The Open Group Process Automation Forum have completed a liaison agreement to leverage FieldComm Group specifications within the OPAF ‘standard of standards’

Announced at the 2018 ARC Forum, FieldComm Group and the OPC Foundation presented their joint vision for creating a protocol independent, process automation device information model (PA-DIM) specification to implement the requirements of the NAMUR Open Architecture (NOA).

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com An open system can impact all phases of a project from inception, through its entire lifecycle including: project design, configuration, operations, and lifecycle maintenance in order to create tremendous savings and value.

Resembling more a bustling city than a trade fair, the 71st Hannover Messe was very busy and chock full of energy and innovation this year, with over 200,000 attendees from 75 countries. Focusing on the theme 'Integrated Industry – Connect & Collaborate', the Digital Factory was front and center.

While serial bus systems will continue to play an important role in the future, solutions based on Industrial Ethernet are becoming increasingly common with Industry 4.0 applications. The focus is less on cable measurements, signal levels or signal shapes, but in the case of standards such as PROFINET, utilization and the greatest possible availability of the networks are the focus of interest.