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Automation.com, November 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Industrial Ethernet protocols, coupled with low cost pervasive Ethernet technology, have made the support of multiple protocols on a single controller a reality, enabling users to leverage the advantages of various networks and make technology additions to existing systems.

By Mike Hughes, Schaeffler Specifying linear motion systems isn’t the black art many engineers think it is. Here are some useful tips on how to select suitable linear actuators for single and multi-axis positioning systems.

Automation.com, November 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Homeland Security's Lisa Kaiser gave a sobering presentation on cyber security issues and attacks. Kaiser emphasized that we are playing catch-up, noting that Foreign Cyber Espionage in the USA has been more intense in the last few years with a large black market for buying and selling information.

By Peter Seeberg and Jürgen Lange, Softing An OPC toolkit is a collection of libraries, classes and interfaces that simplify the development of OPC applications for programmers by providing standard functions for reading and writing OPC items, browsing and managing the OPC address space, and much more.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Cisco's newly-formed Connected Industries Business Unit, recently created to help customers realize the benefits of the transition to Ethernet and IP in manufacturing plants, launched a new switch series and is reaching out to a broad base of potential partners.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Yiannis Dimitratos of DuPont Engineering is charged with developing a competitive position in automation and process control technologies and shared his thoughts at the Siemens 2012 Automation Summit about future plant and automation developments.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor At the recent Building Automation summit, Steve Fey, President of Tridium, shared his thoughts on industry topics and provided an update on Tridium products. Topics included mobility growth, Web development, and security.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Raj Batra of Siemens discusses how the process industries are moving to digitizing plants with virtualization and describes how greater productivity can be achieved with higher level software approaches for programming applications.

Fourteen vendors successfully tested 22 OPC products at the three-day Asian Interoperability (IOP) Workshop, an event sponsored by the OPC Foundation and hosted by the OPC Japan Council this past June in Tokyo, Japan.

By John Rinaldi, Real Time Automation This article examines USB and its applicability for factory floor applications. It addresses the history of USB, the technology, the advantages and limitations of USB in the factory floor environment and how USB will most likely be deployed in the coming years.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor Greg Bodenhamer is responsible for Schneider Electric's internal integration and services group and has been building a program to cooperatively work with independent system integrators. The overall goal is to put the customer first and provide the most effective and efficient solution.

By Peter Seeberg and Jürgen Lange, Softing The third part of this series of articles outlines ten key reasons that have led to the development of an entirely new technology generation, the OPC Unified Architecture.

Automation.com, August 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor To reach higher levels of productivity, Dow Corning made the decision to migrate 32 disparate and unique site-based control systems solutions to one globally consistent automation system - the Siemens PSC 7 platform.

Automation.com, March 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor PI North America, Siemens, and GE Intelligent Platforms hosted the recent PROFINET Executive Leadership Forum. The invitation-only event brought together users to share experiences, best practices and illustrate the value of PROFINET in manufacturing.

Automation.com, March 2012 By Thomas R. Cutler A cloud-based SaaS model for a Machine Tracking Utilization system would allow for a low entry cost for manufacturers to immediately capture data collection enterprise-wide for less than a pilot program.

Automation.com, February 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor The automation industry is learning to go beyond simply providing business systems with data by synergistically using information to collaborate in new ways to make plants more profitable, responsive and efficient.

Automation.com, February 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor At Automation Fair 2011, Rockwell Automation released the new 5730 line of CompactLogix controllers. These controllers allow users and machine builders to get the power of the Logix architecture for smaller applications. Here's an overview of the new line.

Automation.com, February 2012 By Igus To prevent unnecessary downtime, your cable management system must be correctly specified, designed, and installed. Here are seven common cable management mistakes and how you can avoid making them.

Automation.com, February 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor During a half day session at the Sixteenth Annual ARC World Industry Forum Conference some automation vendors made it clear they are adopting OPC UA. This adoption is intended to close the gap between advances in the general computing industry and industrial automation systems.

Automation.com, February 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor OPC UA is emerging as a fundamental technology for implementing Digital Factory concepts to increase production efficiency. The concept was reinforced at the ARC Forum in a session titled, Transforming Manufacturing with OPC UA: From Embedded to the Enterprise.