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Becoming A Must-Have Application
 The core concept of Automation World is the “automation team.”
No one discipline dominates the automation landscape any longer. The road to building this team is not at the end, and there have been many bumps along the way. The economic downturn currently buffeting the industry is prodding more companies to look at the need to bring the team together. Many roles comprise the team, including operators, maintenance technicians, engineers, managers, plant management, division management and enterprise management—all playing their important roles.
All the players must make correct decisions in real time in order for manufacturing to succeed. To do this, they must have the same information base provided in the way that helps each role make the decision required. It’s much like a perfect transition play in basketball where one player grabs the rebound and sees the outlet player. That player surveys the defense and decides to dribble or pass. The ball gets under the basket, and then that player makes the last pass to the open shooter for a three-point shot. Each player has a role and knows where to go and what decisions to make to help the team win.
A software application often called enterprise manufacturing intelligence, or EMI, has evolved to provide a near-real-time picture of how...
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» INFRASTRUCTURE: Prognostics: Manufacturing’s Next Frontier
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“The next frontier beyond measurement and monitoring is the idea and practice of prognostics,” says Arun Sinha, director of business development at Opto 22 (www.opto22.com), a Temecula, Calif.-based automation vendor.
The concept of intelligent maintenance prognostics is more a trending of information, as opposed to predictive maintenance, which is more trending of data, explains Jay Lee, director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) multi-university Center for Intelligence Maintenance Systems (CIMS, www.imscenter.net), at the University of Cincinnati.
Moin Shaikh says prognostics represents an engineering discipline focused on predicting the future condition of a component and/or a system of... Read more
» INDUSTRIES: Megatrends Channel Water/Wastewater’s Future -
Andy Richardson, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Greeley and Hansen (www.greeley-hansen.com), a multi-state engineering firm specializing in the water and wastewater sector, sees 10 megatrends shaping the sector’s future.
His first is “the dawn of the replacement era.” Richardson estimates that about $600 billion—split equally for repair and replacement—is needed “to bring infrastructure back to the basis that it was in the 20th century.” What will be the source of that money? “From governments or within utilities’ service areas,” says Rebecca West, president of the Water Environment Federation (www.wef.org), Alexandria, Va. “We definitely need to spend... Read more
» TECHNOLOGIES: Backup Technologies Expand, Evolve -
When is the last time it happened—your computer’s hard drive crashed and you couldn’t remember the last time you backed it up?
In fact, you weren’t even sure how to back it up anymore. If it’s only happened once in your life, it was one time too many—right?
Memory keeps getting cheaper and smaller. Just think of the number of pictures from your digital camera you can store on one small “card” that slides into a small slot. Computers use something called “EEPROM” or electrically erasable programmable read only memory. A class of memory called “flash” was developed and showed much promise. Compact Flash memory (CF) was thought to be small and inexpensive, but then came... Read more
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