February 2022

Focus on: Drives, Motors & Controls Energy & Environmental Management industrial networks and the Cloud and commercial networks. Turck Banner has Multiprotocol devices which sit between two networks and translate the data to facilitate these interfaces. They also have devices which can bridge two ethernet networks, each able to use their full range of IP addresses. They allow communication between the two networks when required, but otherwise the two networks are completely independent. While HMIs (Human Machine Interface) are commonplace on the machine, increasingly the human element of this interface is no longer present at the machine but is in an office or workshop sometimes thousands of miles away. This is where the cloud-based solutions excel, as the data can be accessed from anywhere. Many solutions also have the facility to send emails and SMS messages to alert someone when urgent attention is required. To access the data from anywhere in a meaningful format, dashboards are created that are typically accessed through a web browser. Each person with a different role in a company will want to see different information on their dashboard from the same machine, and every machine will have its own dashboard. At what point does having a dashboard for every part of the machine become unmanageable? Although the obvious THE HOME OF AUTOMATION SPONSORS 5-7 APRIL 2022 HALLS 9 & 10 NEC BIRMINGHAM REGISTER FREE TODAY www.drives-expo.com #DrivesExpo IN ASSOCIATION WITH: CO-LOCATED WITH: The UK’s leading exhibition for Drives, Automation, Power Transmission and Motion Control Equipment Part of the UK’s largest Manufacturing Event solution is to be able to combine all the information that someone wants into their own unique dashboard, this currently requires significant programming. Currently some standards are being developed to address the problem with dissimilar protocols and, if these are adopted, writing interfaces will become much easier. OPC UA and AutomationML are both open communication developments that define how the data exchange takes place and what the content is. Eventually adding the information, you want from any machine to your own personal dashboard will become as simple as a few clicks. When these things happen, the decentralised model will probably become the normal configuration. Until then the model will be a hybrid somewhere between the two extremes. Centralised or decentralised, they are not mutually exclusive and currently most companies are using a combination of both. Centralised does not mean old and outdated and equally decentralised does not mean you are running the most efficient factory. Decentralised is the direction of the future.