One of the reasons - apart from pigheadedness - for the continuing existence of traditional fieldbuses is the lack of determinism in ethernet networking. Even industrial variants rarely show the reliability required by extremely timing-critical systems. There are ways to overcome this, e.g. by tweaking networking protocols and fine-tuning software. A wholly deterministic and specialized operating system could do the trick as well.
Reading the ICS-CERT security alerts on a daily basis can make you despair, even though most of the vulnerabilities and attacks in and on industrial systems aren't actually world-shattering. However, a few of them do stand out - for example when the target is in use extremely often or the vulnerability is fairly easy to exploit.
We'e all seen a few of those oscillations between full in-house engineering and outsourcing everything. Every few years, management consultants talk owners or CEOs into outsourcing - some times later, when the business went downhill, those consultants' colleagues »save« the companies by convincing the boss of hiring engineering staff again. Then the cycle starts again. A few considerations may help avoiding the most common mistakes.
Plant infrastructures in many industries have been working more or less unchanged for years, sometimes decades. While modern industrial communication systems could improve internal processes, a recent analysis from Frost&Sullivan states a conservative attitude toward the implementation of new technologies.
Are fieldbuses really dead? Quite possible, but they are still twitching. A modernized approach to device management in a bus structure throughout all areas of an industrial plant is FDI - Field Device Integration. The industry alliance behind it is working on IEC standardization, and this week's Achema trade show is a step on the way.
As I mentioned before, this year's Automatica show was bustling with robots of all kinds. One of the most tedious but nevertheless challenging tasks is material handling, for example in injection molding processes, industrial applications and food processing. This is where the control system is becoming more important than the robot hardware.
The European programmable logic controllers (PLC) market witnessed a heavy decline in growth in 2009, owing to the recession of 2008. However, it made a strong recovery in 2010 with all major market participants in Europe experiencing high growth. A new Frost&Sullivan study anticipates continued moderate growth, under some conditions.
An important station of many industrial automation systems is the product packaging - be it in electronic component manufacturing or in food processing. Especially industries with a very diversified product spectrum require flexibility in this area.
Industrial automation systems can be quite versatile - take them out of the factory and beside a rail track and even Britain’s or Germany’s infamous trains might run like an oiled automation line. In order to prove this hypothesis, a transportation company and an automation expert join forces.
Every IT specialist worth his salt wouldn’t connect a critical SCADA system to the Internet without the strictest of precautions. It seems that people like that don’t work for critical US infrastructure facilities.
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