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Thursday, October 30, 2008 |
The second annual OMAC Integration Symposium will be held at the Partners in THINC Facility in Charlotte, NC, December 3-4, 2008. The event agenda has been built around the theme Total System Evolution--a theme that embraces all industries and is vital to the advancement and improvement of processes, business functions, and the ability to meet customers' changing needs.
This year's event will feature optional tours of the Partners in THINC Facility and Okuma America Corporation headquarters, a keynote presentation, the Annual OMAC Membersâo[dot accent] Meeting, insightful presentations from across industry, hands-on demonstrations in the Partners in THINC Facility, and various networking.
Symposium attendees can expect to participate in the following presentations and demonstrations: "Packaging Line Integration with PackML"; "Robot Bin Picking"; "Integrated Control System Design in a PLM Context"; "Designing Products to be Standards Friendly"; "The Interaction of the Various Machine Tools, Accessory Devices, and Tooling"; "Utilization of Wireless Sensor Technology and Vendor Independent Fieldbus Interfaces in Industrial Automation"; "OPC Architectures in Manufacturing"; "Weathering the Storm: Growing and Automation an Emerging Company in Turbulent Times"; "Model Driven Embedded Systems Design Environment for Industrial Automation (MEDIA)"; "Advanced Tool Control and Management"; and "CNC and Automation Integration."
These presentations are being provided by individuals representing many industries, from companies such as B&R Automation, Wonderware, ABB Robotics, P&G, GE Fanuc, ChipBlaster, Matrikon, nCoat, O3neida, Caron Engineering Inc., and Gosiger Automation.
Click to learn more about the 2008 OMAC Integration Symposium or to register.
I went to the first one last year at Boeing. It was quite informative. The organization is trying to grow in new ways--partly by expanding membership to suppliers (it was previously a users group). Looks as though you'll be able to get both a technology perspective from suppliers and application examples from users. Should be good. I won't be there, though. I've already committed to a trip to Europe that week.
4:57:03 PM 
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Not long after announcing that the Elau motion control group was being integrated into an overall Schneider Electric packaging automation group, the company has announced that HMI/SCADA and MES supplier Citect, owned by Schneider since 2006, will be integrated into the company. The HMI/SCADA and MES components will report in to different organizations in France. In the U.S., Schneider Electric North America will integrate the sales, professional services and training teams headquartered in the Atlanta into its Automation and Control organization.
4:44:42 PM
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In another technology partnership, Wurldtech Security Technologies and Matrikon have entered into a "broad cooperation" focused on introducing next-generation cyber risk management for real-time industrial environments. The agreement will permit the integration of Wurldtech's Achilles Technology Suite into Matrikon's assessment service offering.
"The cyber-security landscape has changed dramatically throughout the industrial automation industry and the end result for customers is a high degree of complexity, increased operational costs, limited visibility and reliance on inappropriate data to make critical security decisions," said Tyler Williams, President & CEO of Wurldtech. "This cooperation will leverage each company's core competencies and domain expertise to provide more effective solutions designed to help industrial organizations intelligently manage cyber-security risk from top-floor to shop-floor."
As explained by the press release, in a digital world with increasing connectivity requirements on industrial networks, control systems are becoming increasingly exposed to new cyber risks that can jeopardize process integrity and result in unnecessary downtime. Moreover, as cyber-security risks increase in frequency, severity and sophistication, the process of managing the security of SCADA and process control systems is becoming extremely difficult. For a majority of industrial organizations, the outcome is a weak security risk profile, an insecure network infrastructure, incomplete regulatory compliance, security audit failures and increased security management costs that are not in line with business objectives. This cooperation is designed to address these challenges by combining the award-winning Achilles robustness testing technology with proven risk assessment methodologies to more accurately diagnose system failure-modes based on process risk. This intelligence is paramount when designing and deploying mitigation strategies in order to quantifiably demonstrate a reduction in downtime risk.
"In the past, risk assessment services for industrial organizations such as cyber-security evaluations, penetration testing and NERC CIP gap analysis have been limited to a top down approach with IT-centric tools and techniques, which by design, could not provide the level of intelligence necessary for customers to truly understand risk in the context of impact to process integrity," said Rick Kaun, Director of Industrial Network Security at Matrikon. "By integrating the award-winning Achilles technology and extending our risk assessment service to include the resiliency and robustness testing of legacy SCADA and industrial control systems, we can now provide unparalleled visibility into the safety, security and integrity of critical industrial operations. This will allow us to help customers introduce effective mitigation strategies that will improve system reliability and validate conformance to emerging standards."
4:36:20 PM
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Kepware Technologies and the OPC Foundation have announced a partnership to manage the next generation of OPC technology--OPC-UA. The entities believe that this approach will foster rapid adoption through licensing, quality control and guaranteed interoperability.
This next generation of technology is called OPC-UA (OPen Connectivity âo[base "] Unified Architecture). It delivers all the benefits of OPC Classic, while addressing new demands for greater security, Web Services and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), portability to a wider range of operating system platforms, and the support for new standards in complex data handling. OPC Classic will continue to be widely supported in the industry with OPC-UA offering an additional, more advanced interface for connectivity going forward.
The OPC Foundation feels the adoption of OPC-UA will be greatly enhanced by offering licensable code, rather than leaving vendors to interpret specifications as was the case with OPC Classic. Kepware was chosen as the most suitable company to represent the broadest range of vendors, from services organizations to toolkit vendors and product developers. Going forward, the OPC Foundation and Kepware will manage the development of OPC-UA in a managed community âo[ogonek]open source codeâo[caron] model, with sources distributed by the new joint entity. The entity will be dedicated to the marketing and management of OPC-UA and the OPC-UA vendor community. The entity will follow the form of a Non-Profit, will be staffed and managed by both Kepware and OPC Foundation personnel, with the OPC Foundation providing complete oversight. The entity will manage OPC-UA as a licensable technology. The new community will be based around the opc-ua.com, opc-ua.org and opc-ua.net domains that currently point to the opcfoundation.org Website. The new entity, based originally on a Kepware relationship, will be managed to facilitate a transition to another partner or partners at the discretion of the OPC Foundation.
Community participants will have access to Source Code and will receive a License to use OPC-UA as a component in their products. Participants will also have access to developer forums, and a network of other community participants delivering training, developer resources, and toolkits supporting the OPC-UA initiative. Participants will be in a position to both assist in the maintenance and the direction of OPC-UA technology. This new initiative is scheduled to launch in January of 2009 and all current OPC Foundation members will be contacted for inclusion in this additional community. Other companies interested in joining the community will be directed to OPC-UA.ORG after January 1, 2009.
3:56:37 PM
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Catching up on a backlog of reading during lunch. Here's an article in last week's Business Week, "How to Get Growth Back On Track." Pertinent quote, "American companies must focus on creating innovative goods and services that can be produced in the U.S. and shipped abroad." [Duh...]
12:54:13 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Gary Mintchell.
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