Today’s utilities have a highly productive and efficient business environment that is very competitive and needs to comply with many stringent regulatory requirements to prevent situations that would cause a facility to be down for even a short time.

A slight failure of equipment translates into immediate consequences from both a financial and safety perspective. These pressures move utilities toward building high-availability smart sites that help minimize unscheduled down time and allow for shorter time to repair.

A direct result of this trend is the need for the site to have remote access to equipment. To help facilitate this access, utilities are converting networks to become IP-enabled – but with the many benefits that come with this, the move to IP networks also adds a level of complexity as it becomes increasingly important to securely connect these critical industrial infrastructures. To that end, cellular automation enables cost-effective monitoring and control of data at remote sites.

Controlling Data At Remote Sites
For the most part, Networking with critical equipment are located in places that are difficult to access due to long distances or harsh conditions. Accessing critical information, such as equipment health and operational data at these sites can be time-consuming and costly. Also, given today’s aging industrial infrastructures, monitoring and controlling the data within these sites is more critical than ever. In fact, we are beginning to witness the consequences of not updating and maintaining outdated networks, as demonstrated by recent explosions at gas pipelines and blackouts in major cities when parts of the electrical grids have gone down.

refer to:http://pipelineandgasjournal.com/using-cellular-automation-monitor-and-control-assets

Today, printed circuit boards require more color vision solutions because the color of a component helps to identify each part. Plugs and connectors are color coded, and at the same time, the board is tracked using a black-and-white barcode. “These applications used to be done with a high-resolution monochrome camera, but now, you need to be able to sense color to make sure the right component and connector are in the right place,” Kinney explains. “The barcode will usually be located at the edge of the frame. If you use a single-chip color camera, you have to be concerned about color shading and halos at the edge of the image, and it’s made worse if you use cheap optics.”

White LEDs are made one of two ways: by applying a phosphor coating over a blue LED light that produces a broadband light closer to white light, or by mixing different-colored LEDs to make a broadband light source. Both methods result in a spectral continuum that is higher in some narrow wavelength bands within the white light spectrum compared to others. For the most challenging color vision applications, designers need to carefully match these “spikes” to the specific wavelengths. This is where choosing a lighting supplier with in-house engineers can really help, adds Metaphase’s Technical Sales Manager, Mark Kolvites. A quality supplier will make sure that the actual red, green, and blue (or more) LEDs mix to create a white light, or the blue LEDs with phosphor coating provide uniform illumination without hotspots that can cause trouble for automated inspection systems.
As the information above shows, color machine vision solutions can require in-depth knowledge of the physics behind machine vision. The good news is that by choosing the right supplier and partner, designers can solve applications where success isn’t just black and white.

refer to:http://www.visiononline.org/vision-resources-details.cfm/vision-resources/Is-Your-Machine-Vision-System-Color-Blind/content_id/4333

The ability to operate and manage operations in a location-agnostic manner opens the door to a wealth of opportunities. For instance, experts and operations staff can be relocated to population centers, and out of harms’ way. They can then be leveraged over multiple assets in real-time to ensure maximum utilization. Networking collaboration also allows for much faster creation and utilization of best practices across a network of operating assets, thereby contributing to better knowledge retention and management as well as greater efficiency, and establishing a true, shared corporate culture throughout the enterprise.
Real-World Stories

Offshore operations

The Situation: A leading global producer of crude oil and natural gaslooked for a way to stay ahead of dynamic market demands and overcome challenges associated with offshore oil and gas Automation. As part of an innovative technology project and with the help of Honeywell, this company built a Solutions to help coordinate control of multiple offshore platforms in the North Sea, and improve operations and efficiency.

With the new CCR, this company has centralized operations at 18 of its 26 offshore platforms. All operating and production procedures are fully automated and synchronized, creating increased flexibility and competitive advantage. At the heart of CCR is Honeywell’s Experion Process Knowledge Management System (PKS), which enables operators to monitor and control production at various platforms.

In this particular case, the bigger-picture business goal was time to first oil enabled by an out-of-the-box, customized solution. Even bigger than that, though, is that the refiner estimates a 4-to-6 percent production increase with real-time data networking and analysis.

refer to:

http://www.automation.com/business-transformation-through-remote-collaboration-optimization-and-operations

Now, Kickstarter projects like Ninja Blocks are shipping Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on the BeagleBone (see this article’s lead-in photo), and startup GEEKROO is developing a Mini-ITX carrier board that will turn the Raspberry Pi into the equivalent of a PC. Outside of the low barrier to market entry presented by these low-cost development platforms, maker boards are being implemented in commercial products because their wide I/O expansion capabilities make them applicable for virtually any application, from robotics and industrial control to automotive and home automationsystems. As organizations keep enhancing these board architectures, and more hardware vendors enter the DIY market, the viability of maker platforms for professional product development will continue to increase.

refer to:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/

It is the author’s opinion that integration of the controls networking  and the IT network is inevitable. It became inevitable the moment the controls industry chose to use Ethernet as the medium with which to communicate data. The controls industry may choose to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern automation era, or it can gracefully embrace the change. Embracing means the controls industry would be able to leverage the myriad rich, existing technologies that have been proven foolproof in the IT world. To be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern communications era would do a terrible injustice to those who have worked diligently to bring it about. This could quite possibly add an entirely new facet to the fieldbus wars, which I hope have not been forgotten.

With that said, the controls world is going to be moving with an industry that has a definite consumer bias, with product development and release cycles of six months or less. In an industry where the average life expectancy of an automotive production line is eight years, it is impossible to expect the networking  in an industrial setting to keep up with modern IT standards. Therefore, we turn our attention to the technologies that have existed the longest, with the most open standards and the very best support. These are the protocols we wish to use and keep, and this article highlights and explains some of these technologies.

This article does not focus on the technical implementations of each piece of technology. Rather, it is assumed the reader will be using packaged solutions such as a function block for a PLC. These packages typically require only that the user specifies the relevant server to connect to, the data to be gathered and an activation bit. The particulars of each protocol and concept are, ideally, transparent to the user, and therefore it is not pressing that the user understands what is contained in each packet passed between the server and the client. As each protocol described in this article is openly documented and supported, a simple search on the Internet for the technical details will likely yield the relevant automation details.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications