The Gartner Group recently published an article about the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012, with focus on the core technologies in the IT corporate environment; let’s now comment on how those technologies identified by the Gartner Group for IT apply to the industrial automation environment; those technologies are some of the driving forces of the current renovation and rethinking of industrial software platforms and a new generation of SCADA, HMI, MES and DCS systems.
The technologies identified in the Gartner article are:
“Media Tablets and Beyond”: Before you question whether tablets will be applied on factory floor, keep in mind that in the past it was said Windows, and even TCP/IP networks were not suitable for the factory floor. The fact is that the technologies largely applied to enterprise IT are also inevitably applied to the factory floor, even if there is a time delay in that propagation; although it is important to note that the time delay from IT to Automation has been decreasing each year. Besides the Control Room, the new project architectures for automation systems must be designed for a larger audience of users, each user group using diverse types of appliances, including “smart appliances”, creating as a consequence the reality that software tools need the ability to dynamically adjust things such as its graphical resolution, form-factor, information granularity, according to each user and the devices connected.
“Mobile Centric Applications and Interfaces” and “App Stores and Marketplaces”: The Gartner article states the user interface (UI) paradigm being used during the last 20 years is changing, UI with windows, icons and menus are being replaced by interfaces following the concepts created for mobile appliances. That concept must be understood in a broad way, we are not only talking about more people using apps on smartphones, but those paradigm changes to the User Interface will also happen in the PC and desktop applications. Instead of interfaces being used in the tools created in the last two decades, with complex levels of menus and objects-trees, we will have interfaces oriented to direct exposed touch commands and gestures, like the applications created for iPhones and iPads, but now also running on the desktops; that new UI paradigm for the corporate and industrial automation software, instead of the current dozens of dialogs, trees, menus and contexts menus, will closely resemble the new modern websites or the iPad applications, where the many configuration options and potential actions are more directly exposed to a touch or single-click command.
“Internet of Things”: sensors and physical assets with internet connections are spreading, providing real-time information and access. The borders of the independent scada applications, server and networking health status, asset management, production performance monitoring and maintenance are vanishing; the new platforms on industrial automation are target to enable to act as a real-time process hub, being able to get, analyze, graphic present and dispatch data from multiple devices to multiple applications on the corporation IT environment.
“Context aware computing”: in the previous generation of SCADA/HMI and DCS tools, the potential templates and resources were fixed, and the application engineers and users would adapt themselves to the resources available in the tool. The new generation allows the focus to be on the business process itself, where the application is better able to use the contextual information and is intended to anticipate the potential user needs. As an example, the previous SCADA applications used to request the operator to acknowledge an alarm and then ceased following up that event. The new generation keeps monitoring the alarm even after the acknowledgement to, for instance, automatically request a new confirmation from the operator if the event persists without corrective action; essentially the new generation tools are able to create more dynamic behaviors to increase the quality of the interaction between the operator and the application.
“Big Data”, “In-memory computing” and “Next Generation Analytics”: typical concepts used on previous generations of products, like proprietary file formats, interpreted scripting, single process applications, are not viable at all with the new need for managing large amounts of data while running online and historical data analysis. In this scenario the requirements include full support of multi-core CPUs with native 64 bit architecture, distributed model(s) on the core, higher integration with compiled and advanced frameworks, such as the Microsoft .NET Framework, direct support to web-services, ADO, .NET objects, Java Objects on a multithreaded real-time model, with the configuration files using open standard technologies such as SQL for configuration tables and XAML for advanced graphics object hierarchy.
“Extreme Log-Energy Servers” and “Cloud computing”: the new generation of servers, using dozens of simpler processors with lower energy consumption and the continuously growing arena of cloud computing are creating a new IT infra-structure where software architectures and tools created in previous decades no longer fit. As an example for a production plant monitoring application, the ability to share the development of that application software with a distributed team from many locations, was possible only in very few systems or achieved by having to setup lots of enabling tools. In the new generation of systems, distributed access and versioning is built-in and as easy to setup as accessing your remote email. The use of cloud computing on industrial automation systems must be understood as having two different areas of applications; on one hand it enables, through software tools, another way to work on the automation projects, enabling better collaboration during the engineering phase. On the other hand, it streamlines the publishing of real-time data and process information for remote users and B2B (Business to Business) applications.
Application example
When creating the Tatsoft FactoryStudio framework, an enabling tool for industrial automation and manufacturing applications, it was decided in 2009 to start from a “clean sheet of paper” or a “greenfield” if you will, to allow a clean new unencumbered design, rather than adapting previous legacy code and kernels; while it is a very large and drastic step, it is truly the only way to fully leverage current and upcoming technologies. In that way, FactoryStudio was the first industrial automation platform created from principles for dual use, both on premises and on the cloud, allowing distributed Microsoft .NET applications to collaborate, with real-time graphics delivered to desktops, web and natively to iPhone and iPad devices. Tatsoft invites you to take a look at the new concept of user interface at www.tatsoft.com, using the online demos or requesting the download of the FactoryStudio Express version.
References
Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111018006616/en/Gartner-Identifies-Top-10-Strategic-Technologies-2012
