TABLE OF CONTENTS Integrating systems and communications is now fundamental to automation. While some who work in a specific area of automation may have been able to avoid a good understanding of these topics, that isolation is rapidly coming to an end.
In fact, integration and communications are such an important part of automation that, in some companies, automation responsibility has been turned over to the information technology (IT) departments. While that may solve the integration issue, it usually does not deal with the unique real time and security issues in automation, and it totally ignores the plant floor issues.
What is really needed is a good coupling of IT know-how with a broad knowledge of plant floor automation either by having IT systems specialists learn plant floor controls or by having automation professionals learn more about integration, or both.
Functionality and integration of the shorter time frame operating systems with both plant floor controls and with company business systems is called by several names. However, manufacturing execution systems (MES) is the most common.
The concepts of what functions to do where and when data flows occur has been wrestled with for a couple of decades since the computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) work of the 1980s. It has continued with the tireless work led...
