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Amazon announced a suite of new AWS machine learning services. To many, this announcement appeared to be Amazon’s launching off point towards being a major supplier of predictive maintenance solutions. However, this announcement follows a long history of Amazon carving out its capabilities in industrial digitalization.

Consumer electronics manufacturing is a fast-paced industry. To maintain and enhance their competitive edge, companies in this sector need to regularly adopt innovative technologies in their plants and their products to meet ever-evolving market demands. Currently, this means adopting smart, interconnected manufacturing approaches to create highly responsive and productive factories. To achieve such infrastructure, businesses should invest in the right industrial communications technology.

The new IDTechEx report, "Sensors 2021-2041" uniquely analyses the whole subject in the light of such seismic changes as the COVID-19 virus.

Digital water technologies will innovate and drive forward new solutions in the water and wastewater industries.

Absent an effective OT security plan, OT enterprise and their integrated ICS/SCADA systems are left vulnerable to cyberattacks that could result in financial loss, reputational damage, diminished consumer confidence, and even threaten the safety of citizens—and in the case of critical infrastructures, also threaten national security.

The ANSI/ISA95 standard, generally referred to as ISA95, is an important tool for digitalization. It provides the framework, modeling, and vendor independent common information models which can be applied in any manufacturing or process industry production architecture.

The PLCopen organization and Automation.com conducted a joint survey of PLC programming preferences. Here are some of the results to inform you of current trends in PLC programming and users thoughts on vendors.

You may become nerdy programming PLCs, but once you get into it, you won't care. This post is about programming PLCs. Specifically programming PLCs with Ladder Logic. This is what I've done almost daily for my job for the past several years.

It's time to get a little more specific with what the PLC CPU controls: PLC I/O! This article will discuss discrete I/O, analog I/O and briefly introduce industrial communications protocols.

In part 1 of the Beginner's PLC Overview, we talked about what PLCs are, their history, and how they work. This article will get a little deeper into the PLC's Central Processing Unit (CPU).

If you are interested in learning about PLCs and/or PACs, but you are not sure where to start, then this Beginner's PLC Overview blog series has been written for you!

The most common cause of failure or malfunctioning for inverters is an improper installation, often a combination of not following the user manual recommendation and selecting inappropriate cable type, gauges or in line fuses. But there are more.

The idea of using a PLC-based system rather than a DCS has become a philosophical and technical debate in the industry. DCSs have been the primary solution for process automation but now many PLC vendors are arguing that a single integrated architecture based on PLCs and/or PACs is the best approach to total plant automation.

The integral term of the PID control algorithm increases (or decreases) at a rate inversely proportional to the integral time of the controller.

Automation professionals are critical to successfully selecting and applying these technologies and guiding management to maximize their productivity. This role will continue and expand, as more companies look to make informed productive technological investments and implementation decisions to yield profitable results.

By Bill Lydon Manufacturing and production companies are realizing digitalization requires structure, organizational changes, and integration of information technology (IT), operations technology (OT) and automation technology.

By Bill Lydon Running a manufacturing plant in the COVID-19 pandemic era means distancing coworkers and minimizing their interactions. Fortunately, there are a range of industrial automation solutions available that can help organizations achieve these new goals while also being consistent with digitalization investments to improve productivity.

By Bill Lydon More than 120 industry professionals from more than 50 companies attended to focus on supporting industrial digitalization through the association’s device connectivity technologies, which include the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP) and the network adaptations of CIP: EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, ControlNet and CompoNet.

By Bill Lydon The current state of pharma manufacturing maturity and the future of automation in the sector were important topics at the annual Pharmaceutical Automation Roundtable (PAR) held October 2019 at a Novo Nordisk facility.

Both wired and wireless networks have been undergoing a significant evolution during the past decade, enabling greater opportunities to those who leverage the advancements in the next one.