IndustrialAutomationAsia
ENHANCING ASSET MANAGEMENT THROUGH MOBILITY pg 36
DEVELOPING A CLEAR VISION FOR ENTERPRISE ASSET INTELLIGENCE pg 34
THE VIRTUAL POWER PLANT pg 46 DECEMBER 15/JANUARY 16
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December 15/January 2016
MCI (P) 024/07/2015 | ISSN 0219/5615 | PPS 1561/06/2013 (022960)
Market Outlook 2016 | Asset Management | Alarm Management | Power Plants
MUST READ!
CONVERGENT TRENDS SET TO MAKE 2016 A TIPPING POINT FOR MANUFACTURING pg 26
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M2M/IoT SOLUTIONS
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The CONPROSYS Series of M2M/IoT Solutions:
Challenges Outweighed by Benefits
FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS CONTEC HAS HELD MARKET LEADERSHIP IN JAPAN’S PC-BASED ELECTRONIC MEASUREMENT AND FACTORY AUTOMATION INDUSTRIES. ITS LATEST PRODUCT OFFERING IS ‘CONPROSYS’, A NEW MACHINE TO MACHINE (M2M) / INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT) SYSTEM THAT UTILIZES RAW DATA CAPTURED IN REAL TIME INTO INCREASE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES AND REDUCE FINANCIAL EXPENDITURE. (CONPROSYS System Configuration Diagram shows below)
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How do M2M/IoT systems benefit the manufacturing industry? GC: Essentially the purpose of an M2M/IoT system is to collect raw data in real time from all areas of the manufacturing process, throughout the entire production line, analyze it and then generate information that will improve operational efficiencies and reduce manufacturing costs. Manufacturers place high priority on maintaining product quality, minimizing labor-intensive processes and optimizing time and expenditure on equipment maintenance to control operational overheads. Incorporating an M2M/IoT system into small and medium production lines will help to realize there goals. Larger operations however, may find it difficult to justify
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the investment in an M2M/IoT system because the return is not immediately evident. What impact are M2M/IoT systems having on manufacturing in Asia? GC: The large populations and high economic growth rates of many Asian countries make them attractive destinations for direct foreign investment, in turn spurring further growth and creating a virtuous investment cycle. It is no exaggeration to say Asia is the world’s factory as a vast majority of the globe’s manufacturing is currently done there. To capitalize on the increased opportunities many Asian manufacturing operations are transitioning from labor-intensive to
automated processes. With Japan respected worldwide for its high production standards, operational efficiency and innovational techniques, entrepreneurs throughout Asia are showing considerable interest in Contec’s M2M/IoT systems. In time I believe these systems will impact the manufacturing industry significantly, further accelerating economic growth in the region. What are the challenges of implementing an M2M/IoT system? GC: Firstly, the system set up can be expensive if not managed well. To obtain the raw data, it is necessary to select from the great variety of devices already available on the market the appropriate monitoring device for each aspect of the manufacturing procedure and install it on the production line. To connect the devices a connection
interface, communication protocol and common data format is required. Thus, the reality is that integrating the devices and connecting the interfaces necessary to obtain raw data in real time requires creating an individual gateway. To balance the upfront cost we are now seeing a more affordable operational environment. This is due to reduced network and data transfer costs, advancement in Cloud database technologies and more creative big-data analysis platforms with which to analyze and understand data generated. Secondly, M2M/IoT systems are new and rely on collecting substantial amounts of data locally in the manufacturing environment. To fully utilize this data it is necessary at least initially to draw on local work experience to understand operational procedures and desired outcomes. The key is to create knowledge for use in applications that can be improved upon. Thus, how to integrate the data collected from the field devices and sensors with the information system is a major challenge.
What is ‘CONPROSYS’? GC: Contec developed CONPROSYS in its focus on the factory automation, social infrastructure, smart agriculture and renewable energy markets although it can be used effectively in any industry. Designed to solve M2M/IoT implementation problems, from low network equipment layer connections and communication issues to total system creation issues, it does this within a defined time and cost frame by utilizing an initial M2M/IoT trial system. Simply put, an M2M controller collects real time data from all local sensors and using an in-built intelligent communication protocol either processes it locally using the high performance Human Machine Interface (HMI) software package ‘ACTIVE TOUCH’ which consolidates core information for presentation on a user screen or sends the data directly to the Cloud database. Contec’s M2M Cloud Services allow data to be viewed and understood in easy to understand graphs and lists. Cloud Services are provided with a SaaS model, eliminating any need to prepare
security countermeasures while at the local level company data security concerns can be overcome by an on-premise model. What is Contec wanting to achieve with its M2M/IoT system? GC: Contec has been providing total solutions to Japan’s industrial market for the last 40 years. We are proud to have provided remote monitoring systems for solar power generation and infrastructure equipment at more than 20,000 sites, for example. For more than 30 years Contec has held market leadership in the PC-based electronic measurement and factory automation industries. The M2M/IoT system is the next step in our evolution. It provides everything needed to utilize the solutions and services developed by the company in the pursuit of simplicity, usefulness and ease of use. Contec - ‘Technology for a better life’.
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M2M Controller Configurable Type M2M Controller Integrate Type
Profile
George Chung Chih CHEN
Managing Director
Singapore Contec Pte. Ltd
Holding sales responsibility for the greater South East Asia region incorporating Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and India in addition to Australia and New Zealand markets. George has over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry.
In addition to his time at Contec, George was Business Development Manager for Japan promoting industrial automation computing and prior to that General Manager for cloud server hosting in Australia. Born in Taiwan, he speaks fluent
Mandarin, Japanese and English. George holds a Master of Information Systems and Diploma of E-Commerce from Central Queensland University in Australia in addition to a Degree in Business Administration from Sanno University in Japan.
Contec Co., Ltd.
Headquarters 3-9-31, Himesato, Nishiyodogawa-ku, Osaka 555-0025 JAPAN Singapore Office Tel: +65-6459-1667 E-Mail: sales1@contec.sg ENQUIRY NO. 924
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Visit us on our website at www.iaasiaonline.com ISSUES & INSIGHTS
26
Market Outlook 2016
In IAA’s 2016 Market Outlook 10 executives from 10 different companies express their opinion on the emerging trends in the automation sector and the market opportunities over the next 12 months.
PROCESS CONTROL
31
Improving Accuracy With Servomotors And High Speed Network
Servomotors are important in improving accuracy across operations. By Takeshi Tanaka, Yaskawa Electric (Singapore), and Yuki Honda, Yaskawa Electric Corporation
SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
34
Enterprise Asset Intelligence
IAA spoke with Ryan Goh, VP of sales and GM, Zebra Technologies (Asia Pacific) and Imran Akbar, VP and GM, Enterprise Networks & Communications (ENC), Zebra Technologies, on the company’s technology and growth, especially around Enterprise Asset Intelligence. By Mark Johnston
36
Transforming Asset Management Through Mobility
38
The Intelligent Explorer
42 31
Mobility is changing asset management across many sectors. FinalCAD have one such technology that is helping construction managers optimise their process flows. By Mark Johnston
Discovering the value of data visualisation software. By Dr Warren Becraft, AspenTech Asia Pacific
INSTRUMENTATION & MEASUREMENT
40
A Look At Alarm Fatigue
Alarm fatigue is a common problem in industries that use a lot of alarms. The proper management of alarms is required in order to avoid becoming fatigued.
ENERGY
42
Developing A Smarter Grid For Asia
IAA interviewed Associate Professor Ashwin M Khambadkone, programme director of the Experimental Power Grid Centre (EPGC) in Singapore on the EPGC and the latest research at the centre. By Mark Johnston
SECTOR SPOTLIGHT
46
A New Generation Of Virtual Power Plants
This article aims to answer the following key questions: how is the electricity energy market transforming, how are VPPs changing to meet the opportunities enabled by these transformations, and which suppliers of next-generation VPP solutions are best placed to meet the varying needs of the market? By Emil Berthelsen, Machina Research
ENQUIRY NO. 921
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IndustrialAutomationAsia
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December 15/January 2016
DEVELOPING A CLEAR VISION FOR ENTERPRISE ASSET INTELLIGENCE pg 34
THE VIRTUAL POWER PLANT pg 46 DECEMBER 15/JANUARY 16
www.iaasiaonline.com
MCI (P) 024/ 07/2015 | ISSN 0219/5615 | PPS 1561/06/2013 (022960)
Market Outlook 2016 | Asset Management | Alarm Management | Power Plants
54
ENHANCING ASSET MANAGEMENT THROUGH MOBILITY pg 36
MUST READ!
CONVERGENT TRENDS SET TO MAKE 2016 A TIPPING POINT FOR MANUFACTURING pg 26
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A Clear Vision For Industrial IoT
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Malaysia’s Automation Sector
IAA interviewed Scott Summerville, President, Microscan, on machine vision and the implications of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for his company. By Syed Shah
In this article, we examine a screening of 198 automation vendors in the country, a subset of which was surveyed in-depth on their views of their market and contrast these with the latest industrial developments, namely the massive shift in investment growth sectors. By Fabian Teja Boegershausen, and Frederik Junge, Solidiance
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EDITOR'S PAGE
February / March 2015 | industrial automation asia
A Bright Year Ahead THE year ahead looks bright for the automation sector, with 2016 set to be a game changing year for the Internet of Things (IoT) and many other emerging trends in the technology sphere. It is estimated that the global automation markets will be worth US$185 Billion by 2016 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of nearly eight percent from 2011 to 2016, according to market research report ‘Industrial Controls & Factory Automation: Global Forecast & Analysis (2011-2016)’ published by Markets and Markets. According to the same report the Asia Pacific region is expected to grow at the highest rate due to an increase in production activities, primarily due to cheap labour, a large population base, and lucrative government policies. China is the growth engine for automation in Asia in spite of lower levels of plant automation. India too is gaining factory automation market share, indicates the report. Automation is chiefly responsible for reducing human interaction in the process, as such, lowering labour and production costs, and increasing throughput or production output. One sector to look out for in terms of growth is the semiconductor sector. With the widespread adoption of mobile devices over the years the semiconductor sector has grown significantly. Now with IoT, the semiconductor sector could be in for another growth opportunity with the proliferation of new sensors. We look at some of the latest trends in the industry in this issue of IAA and we take a look at 2016 and some of the new growth opportunities ahead. We also have articles on alarm management, asset management, and some of the latest research into power grids happening in the region.
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Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards 2015
Electrical Drive Market Product Line Strategy Leadership Award (Asia Pacific) Fuji Electric is the pioneer in manufacturing general purpose Variable Speed Drives (VSD) since 1970’s. It has been leading the market in creating more responsive and functional VSD with energy saving characteristics, resulting in its adoption over a wide range of fields. Fuji Electric’s applied SiC technology Low Voltage Variable Speed Drive is being recognized as the best in class in Asia Pacific by Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards. Application of the SiC hybrid module contributes to great energy and space reduction.
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INDUSTRY NEWS
QuickBites Automation Industry Top News at a glance
Yokogawa To Open First Co-innovation Centre In Singapore In 2016 Yokogawa has announced the opening of the first Co-innovation Centre in Singapore in the first quarter of 2016 at its biennial Yokogawa Users Conference Asia Pacific 2015. Lifecycle Management And Security Enhancements Help Organisations Implement And Operate OpenStack Technology HP has announced the availability of HP Helion OpenStack 2.0, a production ready, open source based cloud platform designed to meet enterprise requirements. e-F@ctory Wins Technological Leadership Award For Implementing IIoT In Factory Automation Mitsubishi Electric’s e-F@ctory concept has been honoured by Frost & Sullivan as part of their annual Best Practice Awards. Cartrack Sees Singapore As Platform For Global Growth Cartrack, a provider of fleet management solutions, insurance telematics and vehicle tracking and recovery, has announced that it has registered strong performance in the first six months of its financial year. Siemens PLM Taps Into Indonesian Market With Automotive Supply Chain Seminar Addressing Industry 4.0 As Indonesia moves towards an age of increased digitalisation and connectivity, there is increased expectations of the automotive sector to improve on its productivity and swing around an otherwise lacklustre 2015.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Ruckus Wireless Collaborates With BBLink To Deploy Smart Wi-Fi In Over 1,500 Maternity And Children’s Hospitals Across China Singapore: Ruckus Wireless has announced its collaboration with BBLink (Shanghai) Information & Technology to deploy Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi in over 1,500 maternity and children’s hospitals across China, making it the largest deployment to date for maternity and children’s hospitals in the country. The collaboration comes at a time where smartphone Wi-Fi usage is on the rise as China’s smartphone adoption is witnessing an exponential increase. According to a report by emarketer.com, more than half of all mobile phone users in China will own and use a smartphone in 2015, owing to the rise of affordable, domestically produced devices combined with escalating income. This increased rate of usage combined with China’s densely populated healthcare institutions necessitates a robust and reliable access to Wi-Fi within these spaces. To address this demand, BBLink worked with Ruckus to deploy more than 5,700 units of Ruckus ZoneFlex R300 and ZoneFlex 7372 Access Points (APs), as well as Ruckus SmartCell Gateway 200 WLAN controller in some of China’s leading maternity hospitals, such as Shanghai First Maternity and Infant Hospital and Henan Provincial Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, among others. The Ruckus ZoneFlex APs are designed for high density mobile device environments and latency sensitive applications like Voice and Video over Wi-Fi. Ruckus BeamFlexTM+ adaptive antenna technology enables antennas to adapt to client device orientation in real time, ensuring consistent wireless signal for mobile devices. The company’s Smart Wi-Fi deployment also enables BBLink to implement a highly scalable Wi-Fi network in a cost-effective manner. The organisation’s SmartCell Gateway 200 WLAN controller allows BBLink to build and manage large-scale Wi-Fi networks that can support up to tens of thousands of APs. Additionally, the ability of Ruckus ZoneFlex R300 and ZoneFlex 7372 APs to accommodate up to 250 and 500 clients each, allows BBLink to deploy less APs, resulting in cost savings for the company. The deployment is also expected to further transform patients’ access to maternity care, where the Internet of Things is projected to revolutionalise the digital healthcare experience like never before. Patients can also expect a more productive wait as they can now use popular apps like WeChat to schedule appointments, make payments and access information for leisure and entertainment. BBLink is looking at collaborating with Ruckus to deploy an additional 10,000 units of Ruckus ZoneFlex indoor APs to expand the coverage of its Smart Wi-Fi network to around 2,000 maternity and children’s hospitals across China.
ENQUIRY NO. 919
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INDUSTRY NEWS
Gemalto Recognised With Security Certification At All Its ID Document Production Sites Singapore: Gemalto has been awarded the Intergraf ISO 14298 certification for its operation in Gdansk, Poland. This official recognition by Intergraf, the Federation for Print and Digital Communication, places the company in the unique position of having all its five ID document production sites formally certified. As a result, the company can offer clients business continuity and global supply chain integrity for the production of a wide range of innovative documents including ePassports and eID cards. This new certification is an international standard that specifies requirements for an organisation’s security management system. Intergraf’s provides confidential Implementation Guidelines and Intergraf Certification Requirements (ICR), exclusively developed for the high security printing industry and the specific needs of this market. The company’s clients now benefit from this level of performance, ensuring that ID manufacturing programs enjoy a high level of protection against the risk of disruption. This facility in Poland joins other Gemalto sites in Brazil, Finland and Switzerland that have successfully completed the lengthy and exacting process of certification by Intergraf’s inspection team.
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December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Yokogawa To Open First Co-innovation Centre In Singapore In 2016
Singapore: Yokogawa has announced the opening of the first Co-innovation Centre in Singapore in the first quarter of 2016 at its biennial Yokogawa Users Conference Asia Pacific 2015. The Co-innovation Centre will focus on the development of new industry solutions with clients to boost next generation industrial automation process capabilities. Supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the first centre of its kind to enhance industry collaboration, will involve a total investment of S$112 Million (US$79.10 Million) over the next few years. The Co-innovation Centre is part of the company’s mid-term business plan Transformation 2017, drawn and launched on its 100 years anniversary, for long-term growth and value creation through Process Co-Innovation with clients. Increasingly, clients are facing enormous challenges in enhancing plant availability, reliability, safety and operator effectiveness. The industry is grappling to find solutions to deal with rapidly changing technological and global business environment. The advances in today’s’ sensor & communication technologies is enabling us to get more insights to the manufacturing processes and across the overall supply chain. The integration of information technology and operation technology is increasingly becoming pivotal to derive the required intelligence for effective decision-making process. There is available from new sensor technology. The Industries are in dire need for a breakthrough technology to process big data available from the integration of information technology and operation technology and apply it back to the industrial automation systems to achieve better predictable, highly adaptable and vertically integrated manufacturing processes. The Co-innovation Centre armed with proven technologies from Japan, will focus on strong collaboration & partnership with clients as well as IT companies to develop customer-specific, cross-functional and intelligent solutions. These solutions can bring about wider adoption of remote monitoring technologies that help improve planning and predictability, thereby contributing to the reduction of maintenance costs and operation expenditures. This will improve the efficiencies in resource-scarce countries especially in critical Oil & Gas and Chemical industries and thereby greatly push for higher productivity.
ENQUIRY NO. 926
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INDUSTRY NEWS
Lifecycle Management And Security Enhancements Help Organisations Implement And Operate OpenStack Technology Singapore: HP has announced the availability of HP Helion OpenStack 2.0, a production ready, open source based cloud platform designed to meet enterprise requirements. As organisations strive for the right mix of traditional IT and private cloud technology to run their mission-critical applications and protect sensitive data, many are turning to the flexibility and economics of the OpenStack project. HP Helion OpenStack 2.0 offers an enterprise grade cloud platform, adding new features to address organisations’ lifecycle management and security challenges, including: • Easy provisioning of new infrastructure and the ability to repurpose existing infrastructure to meet scalability needs without impacting availability • Rolling upgrades which facilitate entire cloud environment software upgrades without requiring planned or unplanned downtime • Continuous patch management allowing security patches and updates without application interruption • Easy to use administrator interface, centralised logging and monitoring at scale across a cloud environment • Network configuration flexibility to enable connectivity with existing IT environments • Strict OpenStack API adherence to enable crosscloud compatibility and ability to leverage the upstream ecosystem of third party plug-ins HP Helion OpenStack 2.0 also enables customers to create and manage Software Defined Networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-datacenter environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks Virtualised Services Platform. This removes the boundaries of traditional networking, unlocking the full automation and agility needed for hybrid cloud.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
e-F@ctory Wins Technological Leadership Award For Implementing IIoT In Factory Automation
Singapore: Mitsubishi Electric’s e-F@ctory concept has been honoured by Frost & Sullivan as part of their annual Best Practice Awards. The award recognises Mitsubishi’s e-F@ctory as providing enabling technology in the field of the ‘Industrial Internet Of Things In Factory Automation’. At the award ceremony, held in Singapore, Mitsubishi Electric’s e-F@ ctory concept was the recipient of the 2015 Frost & Sullivan Southeast Asia Enabling Technology Award. The award forms part of Frost & Sullivan’s respected program for recognising best practices in a variety of different industries and application fields. In recent years manufacturing is said to be entering its fourth industrial revolution combining the advances in IT technology, 3D printing, simulation and modeling with advanced automation of factory floor operations. The effect has been great discussion around IIoT, Industry 4.0 as well as spawning regional manufacturing leadership concepts such as ‘Made in China 2025’. But the question remains how to actually achieve these laudable goals, which is where the e-F@ctory platform comes in. At its heart are the core factory automation components such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs), Robots, drives and so on. These are combined with related hardware components to connect those control systems with IT systems making it suitable for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and enterprise applications.
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INDUSTRY NEWS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
DHL Officially Opens Asia Pacific Innovation Centre in Singapore Singapore: DHL has launched its Asia Pacific Innovation Centre (APIC) in Singapore, to develop innovative solutions to meet evolving supply chain needs. The multi-million dollar facility is the company’s first innovation centre outside of Germany, and the first dedicated centre for innovative logistics services in the Asia Pacific region. The centre is located within the S$160million (€104-million) DHL Supply Chain Advanced Regional Centre (ARC) building at Singapore’s Tampines LogisPark. Launched with the support of the Economic Development Board (EDB), the APIC showcases futuristic technologies that will transform logistics operations. These include augmented reality ‘smart glasses’ for warehouse assembly-lines and product picking; drones for delivery of time critical goods like medicines; Maintenance on Demand (MoDe) vehicles that use machine-tomachine (M2M) sensors to boost vehicle uptime by 30 percent; and driverless shuttles for faster, more efficient transportation. Besides showcasing the latest in logistics trends and innovative solutions, APIC serves as a regional platform for collaborative innovation between DHL, customers, industry partners, and independent experts. The centre will drive the company’s Trend Research initiatives focusing on emerging trends
in Asian logistics and economic activity. The Singapore centre is modelled after the company’s first innovation centre in Germany, which has been highly successful and re-launched with a brand new look earlier this year. Besides providing a second customer-centric innovation platform that caters to the Asian market, APIC will also invest in capabilities in analytics, e-commerce and last mile solutions for Asia Pacific markets.
Etihad Airways Partners With Cognizant To Reimagine Digital Guest Experience Across The Group Singapore: Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, and Cognizant, a provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, have announced a strategic agreement to drive digital transformation across the airline and its equity partners. Under the three-year, multi-million dollar deal, Cognizant will help Etihad Airways define its digital strategy and reimagine the guest experience along a guest’s travel journey across the group. By bringing together its digital
strategy, technology, industry and experiential design expertise, Cognizant will conduct a comprehensive study of Etihad Airways’ current business and technology footprint to outline and operationalise a best-in-class digital ecosystem, enabling multi-channel distribution, customer persona segmentation and personalised marketing techniques. Through data and customer insights, Cognizant will enable Etihad Airways, and subsequently its equity partners, to better understand the needs of their
guests. Combining this research with streamlined best practices, processes and technology, the airline will provide guests with customised offerings, tailored travel solutions, and enhanced experiences throughout their journey based on their loyalty status and personal preferences such as product and service features, preferred seating, meal choices, holiday destinations and more. For the airline, this means unlocking new revenue streams, enhancing its brand and building new commercial models.
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INDUSTRY NEWS
Verizon Doubles The Size Of Secure Cloud Interconnect Footprint In Asia-Pacific Singapore: Verizon Enterprise Solutions is adding HP and Verizon Cloud to its Secure Cloud Interconnect service, essentially doubling the size of its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region and increasing the number of cloud providers, giving clients a seamless way to connect, manage and secure their multi-cloud environments. In-region, Verizon now offers connections at 12 locations from five cloud providers. The company previously offered access to Amazon (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) and Google (Hong Kong, Singapore) and Microsoft (Hong Kong) at six locations. Enterprises such as e-commerce retailer Giosis, who markets under the name of Qoo10 primarily in the Asia Pacific Region, have been hesitant to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud due to security, performance and control concerns. Giosis uses Secure Cloud Interconnect to connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) sites in Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney and Los Angeles to display its products on its website. Via Secure Cloud Interconnect, Giosis connects the AWS sites to its headquarters in Seoul for back-end processing such as billing, user authentication and data backup. Leveraging the underlying Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, enterprises can take advantage of the capabilities associated with this design, including consumption-based bandwidth, pre-provisioned on-demand resources, controlled application performance, multiple classes of service and usage-based billing models. Rapid, on-demand provisioning via a centralised online portal reduces deployment time and maintenance requirements for Secure Cloud Interconnect customers. In addition, Secure Cloud Interconnect delivers an integrated experience to access information, content and applications. In total, Secure Cloud Interconnect service now offers secure, private connections to six cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google, HP, Microsoft Azure Express Route for Microsoft Office 365/Skype for Business/ Government Cloud, Salesforce; Verizon ) and three data centre providers (Equinix, CoreSite, and Verizon) at more than 30 global locations in the Americas, Latin America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Did you know?
In region, Verizon now offers connections at 12 locations from five cloud providers.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Cartrack Sees Singapore As Platform For Global Growth Singapore: Cartrack, a provider of fleet management solutions, insurance telematics and vehicle tracking and recovery, has announced that it has registered strong performance in the first six months of its financial year. The company also shared its plan to tap on Singapore as its launch pad for global growth. Globally, the company’s revenue over the six month period from March to August 2015 was S$47 million (US$33.22 million), with EBITDA at S$21 million. This was an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. Earnings per share also increased by 16 percent. As at August 31, 2015, Cartrack has 463,000 paying subscribers worldwide. The company projects that this number will grow to 500,000 by end of this year. The company attributes the strong performance to the growth in number of vehicles and the current focus on resource optimisation, road safety and vehicle pollution management among governments and corporate entities. Another contributing factor is that Cartrack has been investing in building up on awareness of its brand, and strengthening its channel network across Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Furthermore, it has benefitted from a strong take up of its fleet management solutions among Small and Medium sized Enterprise (SME) customers. In Singapore, for instance, many SMEs have adopted Cartrack solutions tapping on grants from the Singapore Government that are designed to encourage the deployment of IT solutions to boost productivity and growth. The past six months also saw the company set up a control centre in Johor, Malaysia, a geographically strategic location between the two major cities of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The move allows it to rapidly access and provide support to customers on the road, and deploy a quick response recovery team in the event of a reported vehicle theft.
INDUSTRY NEWS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Alstom Transport Signs WIth BT For Global Network
Paris, France: BT has announced it has been selected by Alstom Transport, a provider of transport systems and solutions, to consolidate and optimise its global network infrastructure. Through this contract, BT will support the operations of Alstom Transport in more than 300 locations across 59 countries. Under the terms of the agreement, BT will provide end to end network services from its BT Connect portfolio, including wide and local area networks, internet access, integration and maintenance services. Alstom Transport’s network will be managed and supported via BT’s Network Operating Centre in Paris. The contract supports Alstom Transport’s objective to create a single globally managed network, which will form the bedrock of its ICT infrastructure and services going forward. Alstom Transport will also benefit from BT’s new Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute service. This service enables direct access to Microsoft applications by providing customers with the ability to connect directly to the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite, ensuring high performance in a secure environment. Enabling customers to access applications directly in the cloud, whether it is a private or public cloud environment is a key element of BT’s Cloud of Clouds technology vision.
A P P O I N TM E N TS
Retarus Boosts APAC Presence With New MD Singapore: Retarus, a provider of professional messaging solutions managing the safe and efficient flow of information for enterprises worldwide, is strengthening its presence in Asia Pacific to bet- Oliver Prevrhal ter cater to the needs of local businesses with the appointment of Oliver Prevrhal as MD of Retarus Asia. The strategic expansion of its Asian subsidiary in Singapore is meant to boost the messaging service provider’s business in the APAC region. The Asia Pacific market has become a strong focus for Retarus, being the hub of the company’s six key customer sectors — manufacturing, logistics, banking, insurance, ICT and Internet economy. With the appointment of Oliver Prevrhal to expand the local sales, service and engineering team, the company is strengthening its commitment to the region, focusing on new growth markets. Having established a presence in Singapore over the last two years, Retarus’ priority for the upcoming year is to increase its headcount and on expanding e-mail security services among MNCs, resellers and service providers.
Practitioners Give Global Cybersecurity A ‘C’ According To New Research From Tenable Network Security Singapore: Tenable Network Security has released findings from the 2016 Global Cybersecurity Assurance Report Card, in which the world’s information security practitioners gave global cybersecurity readiness a ‘C’ average with an overall score of 76 percent. The 2016 Global Cybersecurity Assurance Report Card tallied responses from six countries and seven industry verticals, and also calculated a global score reflecting the overall confidence levels of security practitioners that the world’s cyber defenses are meeting expectations. According to survey data, global cybersecurity earned an overall score of 76 percent — an underwhelming ‘C’ average. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said they feel ‘about the same’ or ‘more pessimistic’ about their organisations’ ability to defend against cyber attacks compared to last year. When asked about the biggest challenges facing them today, the practitioners cited an overwhelming threat environment as the biggest challenge, while reporting relative confidence in the effectiveness of cybersecurity products.
Key Global Findings Cloudy days ahead — Respondents consistently cited cloud applications (graded D+) and cloud infrastructure (D) as two of the three most challenging IT components for assessing cybersecurity risks. A mobile dilemma — Mobile devices (D) also were reported as particularly challenging when assessing cyber risks. The inability to even detect transient mobile devices in the first place (C) was another big challenge for the world’s security practitioners. Uninvested board members — On the upside, respondents largely believe they have the tools in place to measure overall security effectiveness (B-) and to convey security risks to executives and board members. On the downside, respondents question whether their executives and board members fully understand those security risks (C+) and are investing enough to mitigate them (C).
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INDUSTRY NEWS Siemens PLM Taps Into Indonesian Market With Automotive Supply Chain Seminar Addressing Industry 4.0 Jakarta, Indonsia: As Indonesia moves towards
an age of increased digitalisation and connectivity, there is increased expectations of the automotive sector to improve on its productivity and swing around an otherwise lacklustre 2015. At the ‘Moving Into Industry 4.0: The Power Of PLM In Your Automotive Supply Chain’ seminar co-organised by Siemens PLM Software, Asia Pacific Metalworking equipment News, and Industrial Automation Asia, ideas on harnessing the power of Product Lifecycle Software (PLM) were floated across to the GIAMM (Gabungan Industri Alat Alat Mobil & Motor) members who attended the event held at the Holiday Inn Kemayoran, Jakarta, Indonesia. Attendees ranged from OEM automotive parts makers to representatives from larger automotive corporations. During the seminar, Rajiv Ghatikar, VP and GM, ASEAN/Australasia, for Siemens PLM Software, brought up points with regards to increased complexity across the entire life cycle of a vehicle in a cost effective and streamlined manner and how this is a crucial period in the economic cycle to increase productivity. This is where PLM solutions come in and these solutions are essential in today’s increasingly complex and digital world. Ir Hadi Surjadipradja who is the Secretary General of GIAMM and keynote speaker for the event mentioned, “The Indonesian automotive scene is currently experiencing a downturn but there are many opportunities in technology that we can be exploring in order to ride the uptick when it comes along. The key for us is not to be left behind and adopting PLM solutions to our existing processes is essential.” Mr Surjadipradja also added that the old mindsets of yesterday’s production are still prevalent but the need for a change in momentum has to come as quickly as possible. “What we do not want is to lose our competitiveness and it is true that only the most flexible and efficient manufacturers out there will survive.”
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
DKSH And HAIMER Sign Agreement For Thirteen Countries In Asia Signing ceremony between Haimer and DKSH; Left: Mr. Roman Ratayczak (General Manager, Regional Business Development Technology, DKSH) Right: Mr. Andreas Haimer (President, Haimer Group).
Zurich, Switzerland: DKSH Business Unit Technology, a market expansion services provider for technology companies and HAIMER, a worldwide technology leader in the metal cutting industry, have entered into a distribution agreement across Asia. DKSH will provide HAIMER with marketing and sales as well as distribution services for its cutting tools, tool holders, shrinking devices, balancing machines, 3D sensors and tool management for machine tool manufacturers in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. “Our goals are to increase sales and grow our presence in Asia. Hence this cooperation with DKSH, a strong, reliable and experienced partner with deep roots in Asia, is a logical step for HAIMER,” commented Andreas Haimer, President, Haimer Group.
Cloud Provider Tsukaeru Collaborates With Cloudmatika To Expand Service Footprint To Indonesia Indonesia: Tsukaeru, a cloud computing solutions provider in Japan and an Odin partner, has announced that it has expanded its service offerings to Indonesia through a technology cooperation with local cloud service provider Cloudmatika (PT Awan Solusi Informatika). The collaboration leverages Tsukaeru’s 16-year experience in cloud computing while maintaining full local ownership of Cloudmatika, ensuring compliance with Indonesian cloud governance standards and policies. As a result, Cloudmatika is the only cloud provider in Indonesia that promises near 100 percent availability service-level agreement (SLA), 24/7 support, fully automated autoscale and geo-distant disaster recovery. All of Cloudmatika’s services are hosted and managed in Indonesia. This collaboration marks Tsukaeru’s first foray into Southeast Asia. The company chose Indonesia as the first country in the dynamic region to expand into due to its strong growth prospects — according to the 2015 Odin SMB Cloud Insights study, the Indonesian SMB cloud service market is estimated to hit Rp15 trillion (US$1.2 billion) this year. Tsukaeru intends to set its sights on expansion to Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam in due course. The company already has a presence in Australia as a strategic stakeholder of OzHosting.com. Ted Hilbert, CEO of Cloudmatika, is excited to broaden the breadth of solutions cloud service providers in Indonesia can offer as a result of the collaboration with Tsukaeru. For instance, he sees service automation as a key growth area for the company.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
IAG Cargo Completes Conversion to Accenture Air Cargo Reservation Software to Create More Flexible Reservations Processes
INDUSTRY NEWS
Dyn Evolves Internet Performance Space With Launch Of Internet Intelligence
Singapore: IAG Cargo has successfully upgraded its cargo reservation technology with software from Accenture to help deliver more flexible reservation processes for all commercial cargo operations worldwide. Accenture Air Cargo Reservation software, part of the Accenture Air Cargo Suite, offers IAG Cargo improvements both in functionality and performance. IAG Cargo is using Accenture Cargo Reservation software to simplify booking procedures. The software allows users to take advantage of dynamic rule capabilities and is designed for flexible configuration with a powerful rules engine that can be adjusted as business requirements change.
Launch Of Certificate Of Engineering In Railway And Transportation Engineering
Singapore: The Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES) officially launched the Certificate for Engineering (Railway and Transportation Engineering) accreditation at their 49th Annual Dinner. Minister for Manpower Lim Swee Say presented the CEng (Railway and Transportation Engineering) certificate to 14 members of the IES Railway & Transportation Assessment Committee. The IES is also forming the Technical Committee for Railway and Transportation to drive and support the continual professional development of practitioners in Railway, Automotive and Transportation Engineering. Railway and Transportation Chartered Engineer will need to accumulate 40 Professional Development Units each year by participating in seminars, conferences, trainings and self-study activities. The Land Transport Authority, SBS Transit and SMRT collectively have more than 1,200 officers who are involved in railway, automotive and transportation engineering work. The CEng (Railway & Transportation Engineering) programme opened for applications by December 1, 2015.
Did you know?
The Land Transport Authority, SBS Transit and SMRT collectively have more than 1,200 officers who are involved in railway, automotive, and transportation engineering work.
Singapore: As Singapore gears up to become the world’s first Smart Nation, keeping communities and businesses connected to the Internet is crucial to support better living and working. Likewise, companies are beginning to realise that the performance of the Internet has an impact on their website, app or service and eventually, customer experience, reputation, and revenue. Dyn, an Internet Performance company, announced the availability of Internet Intelligence (II), a SaaS-based product that provides companies with a new and unique view of the Internet by looking at performance between a company’s customers and its Internet assets. Through a consolidated single view across all Internet assets, II allows companies to accurately manage and deploy to their cloud providers, identify issues in real-time while performing root cause analysis of problems and effects and create plans for how to improve and expand their Internet infrastructure — all of which benefit the end-user experience. As an increasing number of companies migrate to the cloud, the ability to mitigate risk and control cloud with Managed DNS is becoming a business imperative. A study conducted by Frost & Sullivan has found increasing focus on cloud computing in Asia Pacific, with 58.6 percent of organisation decision-makers identifying it as their number one priority in the next 12 months. Almost 40 percent of organisations in Singapore are using cloud computing; while more than 35 percent are planning or implementing cloud strategies.
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INDUSTRY NEWS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Endress+Hauser Further AliCloud To Accelerate Regional Cloud Computing Expands Production Adoption With Expanded Hong Kong Data Centre Singapore: AliCloud, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing business division has announced that it has completed the expansion of its data centre operations in Hong Kong by establishing a second availability zone which has officially begun operations to address the increasing demand for cloud computing resources in the Asia Pacific region, including growing requirements for enterprise-class availability and disaster recovery. AliCloud has also set up an international website in English, <intl.alicloud. com>, providing English product descriptions, support for USD payments and tailored for an international audience. AliCloud’s second data centre in Hong Kong is designed with multiple redundancies and points of failure for increased reliability, surpassing Tier 3 standards with 99.99 percent availability and a high level of security. The data centre is well connected to cities in Southeast Asia, leveraging on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to provide high-speed, low-latency services. In May 2014, AliCloud established its first data centre in Hong Kong, formally entering the global cloud computing market. AliCloud has since set up two data centres in Silicon Valley and one in Singapore, and is continually refining the structure of its global network. At present, AliCloud has regional nodes in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Singapore, and the US. New data centres are also planned for Japan, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. At present, Hong Kong AliCloud cloud server nodes support Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Relational Database Service (RDS), Object Storage Service (OSS), Server Load Balancer, Cloud Monitoring System, Cloud Shield and other services. Proprietary Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network services are being planned to meet more sophisticated user requirements. Data from research firm IDC shows that the public cloud market for Asia Pacific, including Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and other Asia Pacific countries, is estimated to be worth US$2.4 billion in 2016 and US$3.55 billion by 2018. Growth rates are significantly higher in Asia Pacific than for the global public cloud computing market, reflecting the huge market potential in the region.
Dr Bernd-Josef Schäfer (Managing Director of Endress+Hauser Flowtec AG), Daniel Mérignargues (Sous-Préfet de Thann-Guebwiller), Klaus Endress (President of the Board of Directors Endress+Hauser), Michel Sordi (Député-Maire de Cernay) and Matthias Altendorf (CEO Endress+Hauser) at the inauguration ceremony (from left).
Reinach, Switzerland: The market for high-quality flowmeters continues to experience strong growth. Endress+Hauser Flowtec has expanded its Cernay plant in Alsace to take advantage of this growth. “By adding 10,000 square metres of production space, we are strengthening the Cernay location for the long haul,” emphasised Bernd-Josef Schäfer, MD for the company. The company has recently started producing vortex flowmeters in Cernay as well. In addition, the space requirements continue to increase for the production of electromagnetic flowmeters and their measuring tubes of up to 2.4 metres in size. “This is why we have bought up an existing factory building right next to our site,” commented Mr Schäfer. A total of 4.2 million euros has been invested in the purchase and renovation of that building and its 9,000 square metres of floor space. A new building with nearly 1,000 square metres of space at a cost of 1.2 million euros was also needed to relieve the bottleneck from lack of space in the existing production line. “This means we can now handle significantly higher part volume and design our production processes with greater autonomy and less dependence on other production processes,” explained Matthias Aschberger, Plant Manager in Cernay. The new building has been equipped with separate loading docks for delivery trucks to help with this. Work on the buildings finished on October 23, 2015. The dedication ceremony for the new building and the extension was held in Cernay with Matthias Altendorf, CEO of the Endress+Hauser Group; Klaus Endress, president of the Board of Directors and Mr Schäfer, MD of Endress+Hauser Flowtec AG in attendance.
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INDUSTRY NEWS
ENQUIRY NO. 922
INDUSTRY UPDATES CLPA And PI To Cooperate For A Transparent Network Infrastructure
The CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) and PI (Profibus & Profinet International) are announcing a close collaboration with the objective of promoting and disseminating the use of open industrial networks. As users aspire to be ready for Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things based manufacturing systems easy integration of various networks, such as CC-Link IE and Profinet, is essential for this. Digital communication using a fieldbus or Industrial Ethernet is already widely used in modern production plants and is an important building block for increasing productivity. The demand for intelligent communication will continue to increase due to megatrends such Industry 4.0 and IIoT. However, the heterogeneous landscape of Industrial Ethernet standards that has existed for years poses the problem that devices and machines of different communication systems are in themselves unable to exchange data. Machine builders are therefore forced to equip their machines with different networks, or plant owners are limited in their selection of suitable machines. Consequently to overcome this there has been a growing need for manufacturer-specific transfer specifications and complicated bespoke converters. With their cooperation, CLPA and PI aim to enable transparent and easy bi-directional communication between CC-Link IE and Profinet devices through Got a Question? standardised interfaces. To this end a Make An Enquiry. ENQUIRY NUMBER joint working group is being established to develop the necessary technical specifications to achieve this goal. When work on the specifications is complete, Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: it will be available to members of both www.iaasiaonline.com organisations for implementation.
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Industrial Communication For The Process Industry In The Context Of Industry 4.0 The technologies of Profibus & Profinet International (PI) have been firmly established in process automation for years. Profibus PA is recognised as the most powerful proven fieldbus solution. Profinet has been expanded in response to specific requirements from users in the process industries. As a backbone Profinet is therefore suited for the merging of process data stored in control systems and field devices. This was reason enough for PI to merge these two technologies from PI into a future-oriented solution that will enable operators of process-related plants to continue using proven installed technology and to simultaneously access the latest technologies and Industry 4.0. To achieve this goal, a corresponding multi-phase project with support of well-known users was launched within PI to establish Profinet broadly in all sectors of the process industry down to the field level. The project objectives are, on the one hand, medium-term objectives, for the deliberate purpose of adapting to technologies currently undergoing development or specification. On the other hand, the use of Profinet is already a reality for process-related applications that do not require explosion protection (such as the water/wastewater and food sectors). Here Profinet as system bus not only carries out the backbone function but also already extends down to the field level, where it provides functions such as network diagnostics and topology detection. Already specified and as such foreseeable are products and solutions in which existing or new Profibus PA segments can be connected to Profinet via intelligent, cross-vendor standardised link components (proxy technologies) with little engineering effort. Work is currently underway on an update to the profile for PA devices that will enable direct connection of process field devices to Profinet and the corresponding mapping for use in non-hazardous areas. As a particularly ambitious goal, current efforts for an Ethernet solution for hazardous areas and long cable distances are being intensively pursued. Industry 4.0 requires Industrial Ethernet as its ‘lifeline’, and Profinet is very well suited for that. The project launched by PI will merge Profibus PA and Profinet by first connecting existing PA solutions Got a Question? followed by gradual integration or Make An Enquiry. development of Profinet technologies ENQUIRY NUMBER needed for PA. This procedure will make Profibus PA into a futureproof building block for Industry 4.0 Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: applications in process technology.
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Standardised Access To CANopen Services From IEC 61131 CAN in Automation (CiA) has released the CiA 314 specification, which substitutes partly the CiA 405 specification published about 20 years. The other parts of CiA 405 have been moved already some years ago to the CiA 302-4 (network variable and process image) and the CiA 3063 (electronic datasheet) documents. The CiA 314 document specifies CANopen-specific function blocks, eg: to write or to read Service Data Objects (SDOs), to inquire the Network Management (NMT) state or the CANopen kernel state. Other function blocks are dedicated for transmitting and receiving EMCY information (emergency messages) as well as for creating object dictionary entries. The providers of CANopen devices programmable in IEC 61131-3 languages and related Soft-PLCs may implement these function blocks to make the application software portable to other platforms. This increases the re-usability of application programs. CANopen devices programmable in IEC 61131-3 languages are used in factory automation, machine control systems, ‘intelligent’ drives as well as displays, and increasingly in mobile machines.
Focus On CAN FD About 100 engineers attended the two-days 15th international CAN Conference (iCC) held in Vienna. The 22 presentations were of high quality, said the organiser, CAN in Automation (CiA). The main focus was on CAN FD, the improved CAN protocol introduced at the 13th iCC in the Hambach castle (Germany). Other topics included Internet of Things (IoT) and secure communication in CAN network systems. Bosch presented a security extension to the CAN protocol. Daimler discussed some internal research results on CAN FD system
CANopen devices programmable in IEC 61131-3 languages are used in factory automation, machine control systems, and ‘intelligent’ drives.
design aspects. The airborne industry made in an ad hoc presentation a commitment to use CAN FD in aircrafts. In the tabletop exhibition Cypress, Fraunhofer, Kvaser, Microchip, and Renesas showed their latest ISO CAN FD implementations. Microchip announced a CAN FD stand-alone controller with integrated transceiver. All presentations are documented in the proceedings, which can be purchased from CiA office in Nuremberg (Germany). This includes the papers on transceiver add-on circuitry hiding CAN FD messages to legacy Classical
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Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
CAN implementations by Kvaser (FD Filter) and NXP (FD Shield). Another interesting paper was given by Denso about its Ringing Suppression technology based on dynamic bus impedance adjustment.
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A Robust Foundation For The Industrial IoT
AainaA-Ridtz A.R
Easier integration will empower transformative applications. By FieldComm Group It is really too bad that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) includes the word ‘Internet’. For process industry practitioners tasked with keeping industrial processes running safely and securely, the word sometimes conjures images of process-critical systems connected directly to the public cloud — and the IoT goes beyond traditional cyber nightmares that come internet connectivity, and with such scenarios. insteed connects many ‘objects’ and ‘things’. “Every day we hear of another high profile hack,” noted Scott Saunders, president and CEO of Moore Industries-International, a specialist in process instrumentation interface solutions. For the process industries, cyber security is a critical and growing concern, Saunders says. “It is not like a home automation system where cyber concerns are real but limited. Plants can have ‘kaboom’ situations that threaten entire communities.” An Intranet Of Things The process industries, in particular, embarked on their own IIoT journey to realise the power of networked digital systems long before the advent of the consumer and commercial Internet. Today, increasingly capable networked devices and sensors, together with powerful software applications, continue a slow but inexorable transformation of process operations begun decades ago. Some progressive industrial enterprises already have begun to realise the IIoT’s promise of data-driven decisionmaking to optimise processes and predictive diagnostics. And, more often than not, they rely Got a Question? on a robust, reliable and secure Make An Enquiry. infrastructure of communication ENQUIRY NUMBER technologies developed over the years to meet the specific needs of process automation, notably the HART Turn to page 72a to enquire protocol, Foundation fieldbus and FDI or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com — all of which are now managed on
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behalf of industry by the FieldComm Group. Despite rapidly advancing network technology and growing attention to the IIoT’s promise, the needs of the process industries continue to resist the application of commercial networking technologies at the field level, noted Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer, Emerson Process Management. “While Ethernet has reached further down the automation hierarchy in discrete manufacturing applications, issues such as distance, intrinsic safety and loop power have limited our ability to use off-the-shelf network technologies,” Mr Zornio remarked. Data And Protocols Already Here Modern process automation systems, for example, now include built-in multiplexers for seamlessly extracting digital HART information from analogue transmitter signals. Leveraging these capabilities, together with full digital Foundation fieldbus and WirelessHART networks, industrial facilities have never been better equipped to extract from their field assets a wealth of digital information related to instrument and equipment health as well as safety and energy efficiency performance. Ted Masters, president and CEO, FieldComm Group, believes that the process industries can draw inspiration from the IIoT’s momentum to capture the value of the digital information that is already available in the millions of smart instruments installed worldwide. The vast majority of those smarts are used only during calibration and commissioning, Mr Masters noted. “Now is the time to go get that digital data and use it to improve process performance. Easier Integration Is Next Frontier As the FieldComm Group’s protocols have demonstrated their utility and robustness through billions of instrument hours, the primary goals of the organisation have shifted from advancing the protocols themselves to making it easier for users to integrate and extract value from their installed base. “One thing we have recognised, with the FDI effort in particular, is that it is not so much the protocols but the integration of data that is meaningful — and most difficult,” said Emerson’s Zornio. Early on, integration issues were exacerbated by multiple host implementations that often did not interoperate in a multi-vendor environment. Users also have had to use multiple data formatting and presentation standards such as EDDL and DTM. “We learned that if it is not easily integratable, it is no good,” Mr Zornio remarked.
Asia
admeijer, Netherlands
EtherCAT And OPC UA: Hand In Hand For Industry 4.0 And IoT Since the EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) and the OPC Foundation (OPCF) decided to work together on common interfaces for Industry 4.0 and IoT, the specification work is in full progress. The goal of the cooperation is the consistent communication between EtherCAT and OPC UA. Industry 4.0 and IoT demand continuous communication through all layers and levels within the digital factory and into the Cloud. Since the ETG and OPCF announced their cooperation earlier this year, both organisations work on an interface which integrates existing devices and machines into an Industry 4.0 conformant communication, on the basis of the EtherCAT communication. The report of the Platform Industry 4.0, in which the reference architecture proposes an encapsulation of the devices and their networking. The real-time communication information from the EtherCAT networks are made available for the Industry 4.0
components and Cloud services through the defined mapping on the OPC UA information model. Security measurements protect the encapsulated machine or the single device from non-authorised manipulation. Specifically, use cases have already been defined and the requirements for an interface specification have been derived. The information available within an EtherCAT network is displayed with an object dictionary. An EtherCAT Automation Protocol (EAP) participant, the EtherCAT master as well as the EtherCAT participant normally have such a dictionary with the configuration information and the actual process data of the components. The mapping of this information, set to the OPC UA information model is defined within the common specification that is currently in progress. Also, the expansion of the OPC UA services via a publisher/subscriber model is taken into account within
the specification. Since the EAP is also based on this model, it is obvious to co-design the extension of the OPCF in a way that enables the seamless integration of the OPC UA services into the EAP real-time communication. With the implementation of the specification, the information within a component such as a machine or a device from the machine network, is mapped to Industry 4.0 conformant communication mechanisms and is made available for the component. This enables consistent access to all information, and takes into account security aspects and real-time requirements in the production levels of a plant.
EtherCAT In Outer Space: Robustness Is Paramount EtherCAT-based Space Joystick (RJo) with Force Feedback, developed by the Robotics und Mechatronics Center of the German Space Agency (DLR) (Photo: DLR/Simon Schätzle (CC-BY 3.0)).
EtherCAT is currently used by several projects on the International Space Station (ISS). Both in ‘Kontur 2’, a joint project of the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the Russian Federal Space Agency Roskosmos, as well as in the ‘Haptics’ projects of the European Space Agency (ESA). For the first time, a robot on earth with several degrees of freedom was remote controlled from the ISS. For this task, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko used the Joystick ‘RJo’, developed by the Robotics and Mechatronics Centre of the German Aerospace Centre. Thanks to force feedback, the user in micro gravity feels the contact forces of the robot on the ground. The sensors and motors of the joystick are networked with EtherCAT. In this DLR project, a communication link to the ISS is used that has a very short round trip time of 2 - 4 ms, but provides very little bandwidth and is only available for a few minutes while the ISS flies by. In contrast, Dr André Schiele, head of the ESA
Telerobotics & Haptics Laboratory, and his team are making use of a communication link facilitated by NASA via geo-synchronous satellites, which has much more bandwidth and almost unlimited contact time, but provides special challenges to the control algorithms due to roundtrip times of around 850 ms. ESA also developed an EtherCAT based joystick for their projects. While in Haptics-1, a set of physiological data for force feedback in microgravity is collected, Got a Question? in Haptics-2, the communication link from Make An Enquiry. outer space is used for tele robotics. This is ENQUIRY NUMBER similar to the Kontur-2 project of DLR, but with different control engineering boundary conditions. In Haptics-2, for the first time Turn to page 72a to enquire ever, the control of an axis on the ground or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com with force feedback from space was realised.
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ISSUES & INSIGHTS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Market Outlook, Opinion, Executive Insight
Market
Outlook 2016
IN IAA’S 2016 MARKET OUTLOOK 10 EXECUTIVES FROM 10 DIFFERENT COMPANIES EXPRESS THEIR OPINION ON THE EMERGING TRENDS IN THE AUTOMATION SECTOR AND THE MARKET OPPORTUNITIES OVER THE NEXT 12 MONTHS.
ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
TANG POI TOONG, MARKETING DIRECTOR (SOUTHEAST ASIA), ROCKWELL AUTOMATION DISCUSSES THE CONNECTED ENTERPRISE AND THE COMPANY’S AGENDA GOING FORWARD.
In 2016, Rockwell Automation will continue pursuing its vision of helping manufacturers to become connected enterprises, facilitating the convergence of plant-floor Operations Technology (OT) and business-level Information Technology (IT). By enabling a myriad of remote sensors and devices to collect and exchange data, people and processes across the enterprise and throughout the entire supply chain are connected using a secure, standards-based Industrial EtherNet/IP network. Our company is taking advantage of the proliferation of smarter in-factory and field devices, big data/analytics, cloud computing, virtualisation, mobility and security, so that our customers are further productive and the world is more sustainable. The key to achieving The Connected Enterprise is the ability to converge IT and OT, two independent architectures and systems, into a single, unified design. However, to do so, there are a number of technical and cultural challenges that need to be addressed. Moreover, security is a critical
obstacle to any Connected Enterprise, with data showing 70 percent of businesses had some type of IT security breach last year. To help manufacturers overcome these challenges, Rockwell Automation developed a five-stage standardised execution model toward becoming a Connected Enterprise: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Assess the OT/IT framework Secure and upgrade network and controls Define and organise working data capital Measure, analyse and monitor operations Optimise and collaborate
We expect to see a continual merging of technology and communication networks, as well as streamlined networks in business and the industrial environments, as Ethernet becomes the network of choice because it is easy to understand and deploy. There is an estimated US$14 trillion in additional value that businesses can unlock and enjoy by simply maximising top line growth and minimising costs through IoT adoption. As for Southeast Asia, the company will stay focused on Oil and Gas, Food and Beverage, Mining and Cement, Water and Wastewater, Auto and Tyre, Consumer Packaged Goods, as well as the Semiconductor and Electronics industries.
FUJI ELECTRIC
ATSUSHI SHIRAYAMA, PRESIDENT & CEO, FUJI ELECTRIC DISCUSSES THE COMPANY’S TARGETS FOR 2016 AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT ARE EMERGING IN THE COMING YEARS.
The year 2015 is ending with sluggish market conditions due to various issues such as currency, low oil prices, political uncertainties, China’s economic slowdown, and so on, and I can expect this trend to continue into the foreseeable future. As a manufacturing company, we are affected by current market conditions and it would be a big challenge for us to accomplish our targets in 2016. To breakthrough the current situation and get new opportunities for business growth, Fuji Electric Asia Pacific is poised to overcome such challenges and in the process of transforming from a component sales company to a system solutions provider with a stronger EPC function and support more industrial EPC. Fuji Electric has acquired Singaporean low-voltage switchboard manufacturer (Fuji SMBE Pte. Ltd. ) to strengthen the Asian business last year. We are anticipating that this acquisition will bring synergy to the Fuji Group and continue serving the evolving needs of the industry. We continue to focus on infrastructure projects such as data centre, water process, MRT, hospital, desalination with a wide range of sustainable, innovative solutions and expand industrial equipment, electrical drive, transformer business in Philippines, Malaysia as well as Singapore, which are considered as relatively stable markets.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
EFACEC
JORGE COUTO, GLOBAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, EFACEC, GAVE HIS THOUGHTS ON 2016, AND THE COMPANY’S FUTURE DIRECTION.
This year, Efacec has observed the rapid evolvement of the logistics industry and its ability to overcome obstacles including customers’ demands for warehousing solutions that provides end-to-end visibility, shorter logistics life cycles, lower energy consumption, and the ability to deal with large volumes of small-quantity orders. Efacec has always believed in providing each client with customised solutions to address their specific needs. In this regard, we have developed an in-house software that manages the complete automated system and focuses on reacting immediately to requests, thereby reducing energy consumption and mechanical wear-and-tear. Also addressing the notion of ‘big data’ and the ‘Internet of Things’, Efacec’s software enables users to virtually access crucial data, reducing actual downtime through scheduling spare parts replenishment, and arranging for aftersales service appointments. Coupled with factors such as concentration, tax uniformisation, changes in consumer behaviour, and environmental consciousness, the company foresees an increase in automation across Asia come 2016 as companies recognise the benefits of automated warehousing solutions. The organisation is aware of the available growth opportunities, and is committed to designing the most suitable, efficient solution for each client. With Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam cancelling nominal duty taxes under the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement at the end of 2015, a general increase in trade activity is to be expected, and automation may be the best solution to support this growth. Although we expect a longer transition period for manufacturers operating in less developed regions, the concept of automation is recognised by industry professionals for its productivity and cost-efficiency benefits, which will go a long way towards the progress of these countries.
ISSUES & INSIGHTS
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The concept of automation is recognised by industry professionals for its productivity and cost-efficiency benefits.
FLUKE SOUTH EAST ASIA
YEO CHENG NGEE, DIRECTOR OF COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS, FLUKE SOUTH EAST ASIA TALKS ABOUT THE LATEST TRENDS IN THE TEST AND MEASUREMENT SECTOR AND THE ORGANISATION’S PLANS FOR 2016 AND BEYOND.
With more advanced applications or more machinery being deployed in the field, there will be a need for more advanced test tools and equipment in order to be able to troubleshoot more effectively in the field. The issue that came up is that a lot of engineers and technicians are new to the advancement of the test tools and equipments, so they need more help in terms of simplicity of tools so that they can do their job faster or be more productive. Fluke is going to develop more tools that are going to sit on the Fluke Connect platform, so more of our devices will be surrounding this application. We are trying to bring our customers into this field Connect application so that it helps improve their productivity, and help in ease of collecting data. As such, in 2016 I see more tools that we are going to launch soon surrounding this application to bring more devices to simplify the measurement for the end user to collect data. I think the challenge is actually the currency, I believe Forex makes a big impact where the local purchase decision has to be delayed due to the local prices being eroded by the devaluation of the local currency. If the US economy can recover and the interest rates can be adjusted I think local pricing will be under pressure. How does that translate to purchase behaviour is going to be a big challenges for us. 2015 has been a pretty tough second half due to the currency fluctuation and the weakness in the Chinese economy, which impacts Southeast Asia. If you look at 2016, if China can recover and hold its position at seven to eight percent growth then that will help Southeast Asia, because Southeast Asia is basically an export economy. At the same time I think Southeast Asia is still considered an emerging market, there is still a lot of white space that we could explore. Having said that I think infrastructure building is going to be key. A lot of governments are investing and looking into this area, which will provide opportunities for Fluke and all channel partners to grow in this area.
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ISSUES & INSIGHTS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS Moving forward into 2016, we continue to believe that improving productivity through automation is crucial.
FESTO
CHRISTIAN BURDIN, MD, FESTO (SEA) DISCUSSES THE TRENDS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN 2016 AND BEYOND.
Festo has been actively engaged in the South East Asian market for around 40 years, and presently we have already established branch offices and distributor networks in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. For many years, we have been working closely with our customers from various industries, such as Electronics Light Assembly, Food and Beverage, Automotive, Water and Wastewater treatment, to successfully improve their productivity through automation. Moving forward into 2016, we continue to believe that improving productivity through automation is crucial. We can look at all the improvements in our products and services that benefit customers across the board. From a services standpoint, our customers across SEA now benefit from two regional based centres to take care of their every need. In Kuala Lumpur, our Multi-National Contact Centre provides customers with timely support and communication. With the guarantee of 24 hour delivery of our standard range of products, the Regional Services Centre in Singapore provides our customers with quick and reliable services to improve the efficiency of their businesses. Another area we are very proactively involved in is Industry 4.0. This is the industrial process of the future, in which products and production facilities are the active system components, behaving in a self-optimised manner to create efficient, cost effective and environmentally-friendly production process that conserves resources.
CHANDRAN NAIR, VP (ASIA PACIFIC), NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS DISCUSSES THE TEST AND MEASUREMENT TRENDS, AND THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUCH COMPANIES IN 2016 AND BEYOND.
In regards to technology, we spend about 16 percent of our revenue on R&D and a large part of it goes towards software and of course hardware platform development. On the software side in 2016 we can expect improvements in our core products, like LABView, which will increase connectivity to smart devices which will increase the analytics capabilities so that people can use the data in more effective ways. We will also see a lot of improvements in software tools that can make our customers more productive so what that really means is to be able to use common frameworks across different applications by a click of the button. These kind of software technologies will be made available in the next one and two years. In terms of growth opportunities, If you look at NIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business there are two major competences, one is the test side of our business and the other is the embedded side of our business. On the test side of our business we see a lot of growth whether it be smart devices or consumer Internet of Things. All the devices need to be tested so there is a lot of growth there. Almost every single device that comes out nowadays is multifunction. There are at least two or three technologies converging in that device. A bicycle is still a bicycle but if you just look at the technology in the bicycle you get anything from a $50 bicycle to $15,000 bicycle, so as devices get more complex the testing increases a lot and that itself is an increasing market for us. Now on the other side, the embedded side, yes we have the Industrial Internet of Things, that is one side, but you also have machines that continuously require improvements in their machine condition monitoring. For example, we see the ability to monitor a large number of assets, for instance, railways. In Singapore, if you have a better way to test the tracks before they get spoilt, whether it is an electrical or a mechanical device. To be able to monitor these large number of assets and be able to map that to improvements.
The growth of the semiconductor sector is a great benefit to our business and it is an area we can capitalise on going forward.
ISSUES & INSIGHTS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
DHL
WILLIAM MEAHL, CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, DHL DISCUSSES THE TRENDS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE LOGISTICS SUPPLY CHAIN.
In 2016, we will continue to expand our business. We spend 1.5 to 2 billion euros on our business facilities and expansion, new transportation networks, new electric vehicles, and IT systems. We need capacity to be able to handle our load. This is still a very physical business. I believe we are in the top 10 employers in the world. People touch things, it is very hands on. There are lots of opportunities. Everytime we grow we have to open something. The supply chain business contract logistics means every time we are successful in convincing a customer to do business with us we, generally speaking, need a new facility. Not only are we opening new facilities, we are expanding existing facilities. Our express business which has a mega hub in Germany is currently doubling the size of that hub at the moment. We are expanding in the east midlands airport in the UK. We are doubling the size of our Cincinnati hub in the US. Last year we expanded our Mexico City hub, so it is happening constantly throughout the world. In terms of challenges, we would love, as with everyone else in business, a more robust economy across the globe. Certainly some of the difficult issues from a geopolitical standpoint the world faces are not good for smooth commerce amongst countries and regions, that makes our lives difficult. If we went back to what it was like in 2004 or 2006 that would be wonderful, people would be buying, selling, and doing more commerce, but that is not the case. The good thing about us is our portfolio. We have four big businesses and each in their own logistics space. They are leaders in those industries themselves, and we are across 220 countries, so we have a lot of geography scope, and then we are in every market segment.
DATAPIPE
DAVID THOMPSON, HEAD OF SALES, DATAPIPE DISCUSSES THE LATEST TRENDS IN CYBERSECURITY.
Our key regional hub was Hong Kong. We had one node deployed in Singapore. I was brought in in 2014 to build out our sales and solutions architecture team so we did not have any sales execution on the ground. As you probably know, if you do not have a presence here you are not going to be successful in taking customers on that journey. We have put some significant investment into offices here, into personnel here and we will continue to deploy operation resources here outside of our Hong Kong hub. At our Hong Kong hub we have about 100 engineers. Our broad level focus now is to build out Singapore from an operational capability as well. Singapore is a key market for us, with the smart nation initiative, and the sponsorship from the government around driving towards cloud and incentivising that. We see a lot of opportunity coming from Malaysia, we see a lot of opportunity coming from the Philippines, and from Vietnam, and Thailand, but our hub will be based in Singapore, and we will eventually go into those markets based on customer requirements. We are obviously going to focus on our key markets. By breaking it into three separate regions, and we take China out and our go to market in China really is supporting western MNCs going into China. We are not trying to target Chinese Enterprises. That is not a market we are interested in. We support large global entities who want a presence in China behind the great firewall. Hong Kong is a key market for us, it is an MNC hub. Singapore is a key market for us, which is an MNC hub with the growth and cloud adoption that we are seeing in the region. We are also going into Australia in Q4 of 2015, so we will be deployed in Sydney and Melbourne at the end of Q4 of 2015. Some of the trends for us include Big Data, which some organisations building their own software. We are starting to see companies, such as, Amazon attempting to deploy native services to compete against some of its own partners.
The logistics sector continues to do well, with continued expansion in Southeast Asia.
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P 30 B
PROCESS ISSUES & CONTROL INSIGHTS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
PEPPERL+FUCHS
HEWLETT PACKARD
What is a very important point for us is the topic of Industry 4.0, which is considered in Europe a very big tagline, but here in Asia we recognised that the perception of this term or the understanding of the actual definition of Industry 4.0 is not very clear. Getting our customers to understand more about Industry 4.0 would probably be one of our tasks for the coming year. There has been a lot of talk around this term, so we would like to pinpoint on the features and advantages of the so called intelligent sensors, which are increasingly needed in the field of automation. We have a very interesting concept, which we will roll out in the upcoming year. It is called the Smart Bridge concept. The Smart Bridge is a system consisting of an adapter together with an app for mobile devices or tablets, which makes it possible to connect the intelligent sensor wirelessly to the so called Industry 4.0 concept. We can access the data, making this app together with the Smart Bridge a convenient tool to read measurement and process data. I think what is widely discussed at the moment is the slowing of the Chinese economy. The ASEAN countries, which are very closely connected to the Chinese economy, are seeing some budget and cost cutting measures and this is of course a trend of decreasing investment in the ASEAN community. It is what we are facing already right now. A second point, from the political perspective is of course the very strong currency fluctuation, which we can see in many of the countries around Singapore. As we are transacting either in Singapore dollars or US dollars or the Euro currency, this will have an impact on our business. We see that many businesses in ASEAN are still very related or predominantly based on low wages so there must be changes probably in this as well. More to a value add, and a more comprehensive approach. Pepperl+Fuchs will implement for the coming year the Global Distribution Centre (GDC), which is a fully automated logistics centre here in Singapore. We will serve not only the Asia-Pacific region but also the other logistics hubs of P+F in the world and this should help to achieve a very fast and smooth delivery and logistics process. In ASEAN, P+F is the only provider in the in the field of sensors and systems for factory automation with a logistics centre of this size. The GDC will go into operation in July 2016.
At the global level we have had some very good acquisitions. Eucalyptus is an example, where Eucalyptus enables our customers to build an Amazon compatible private cloud, so for those customers that like the Amazon model of public cloud, you can use Eucalyptus to build those Amazon compatible workloads on premise and then in the future if you would like to move them to Amazon public cloud you can easily do it. In addition, if you have been running public workloads on Amazon public cloud you may decide that you want to move it on premise and whether it is for SLAs, whether SLAs or cost effectiveness, or security, whatever it may be, then you can use Eucalyptus to do that. We have been looking at very selective acquisition of capabilities that builds out our portfolio. Cloud is a broad area for HP and we see it as one of the transformational areas for our customers and for ourselves. We reported US$3 billion in cloud revenue from HP in our fiscal year 2015 and we believe this will grow quite a bit. We grew at about 20 percent so we see that growth in cloud. We are working across the region in every country we see opportunities, we are bringing the ecosystem to enable our partners and service providers to deliver on cloud and I think the growth will come and the enablement of the ecosystem and working with customers to really help them in taking practical steps to cloud and build the cloud stack and cloud is very foundational to then converging these digital technologies.
DANIEL WINKLER, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, PEPPERL+FUCHS (SINGAPORE) DISCUSSES THE TRENDS IN THE SENSOR SECTOR AND OPPORTUNITIES HE SEES IN 2016.
AMAN NEIL DOKANIA, VP & GENERAL MANAGER, HEWLETT PACKARD DISCUSSES CLOUD TECHNOLOGY AND THE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE COMING YEARS.
Getting our customers to understand more about Industry 4.0 would probably be one of our tasks ENQUIRY NUMBER for 2016. Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
8201
Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
PROCESS CONTROL
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
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ARTICLE TAG Servo Motors, Accuracy, Recommendations
IMPROVING ACCURACY WITH SERVOMOTORS AND HIGH SPEED NETWORK
SERVOMOTORS ARE IMPORTANT IN IMPROVING ACCURACY ACROSS OPERATIONS. BY TAKESHI TANAKA, YASKAWA ELECTRIC (SINGAPORE), AND YUKI HONDA, YASKAWA ELECTRIC CORPORATION Most production machines are equipped with motors such as induction motors, stepping motors or servo motors. Servo motors are used when accurate positioning is required. Since the mechanism of the machine have been more complicated and required faster processes in recent years, the number of servo motors which have been used in such machines have increased. One example is that in semiconductor IC test machine, 35,000 to 40,000 CPH(Cycle Per Hour) is required. This means 11 IC chips need to be tested every one second and it takes only 90msec for one IC chip to be tested including motor positioning time. In such an IC tester machine, it uses 20 to 30 servo motors. An explaination will be given on how servo products and its high-speed network achieve the demand, followed by an introduction of what type of motors are available in servo products and what measures are taken to maximise machine performance. Servo Accuracy Due to dealing with smaller products, shortening tact time and improving quality of processes, accurate control of servo drive systems has been required in a variety of applications. To satisfy such demands, we offer AC servo drives called Sigma7 series. The following explains its functions to improve accuracy of industrial machines. •
24 bit motor encoder Positioning accuracy needs to be improved because of the size or parts being handled by servo motors are getting smaller. The inclusion of a 24 bit encoder enables highly-accurate positioning. The highresolution encoder outputs 16,777,216 pulses per rotation. This is converted to 1.2nm resolution for 20mm lead ball screws.
•
Vibration suppression function Due to a low rigidity and several massspring elements in the mechanical structure, a machine experiences vibrations with different low-frequencies. The vibrations hinder accuracy of machines in such a structure since the load attached to the servomotor does not settle its position while the servomotor completely reached to its target position. A servo that can suppress two different low-frequencies simultaneously would be useful.
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Motor ripple compensation When a servomotor rotates at a relatively low-speed such as around 10rpm, a fluctuation of the speed profile called speed ripples tend to be seen. Speed ripples affects machine performance when accurate and stable speed of motion is required A servo that can reduce speed ripples would be beneficial in this case.
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Less deviation control type Due to delay of position references, output trajectory is different from its position references such as the corner cut. A servo with a lineup specialised for trajectory tracking applications such as laser processing machines and dispensers is a useful addition. This types of servo provides built-in control with less deviation, which enables higher tracking performance.
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Full closed loop control An encoder equipped with a servo motor cannot monitor a machine position when mechanical parts are attached on motor shafts such as a handling robot. A servo that can feedback the actual machine position
Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
ENQUIRY NUMBER
8301
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PROCESS CONTROL
For a long time, control command of a servo motor was sent by analogue voltage command or pulse train command from a master controller. However, recently Ethernet technology has become common, even in factory automation.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
directly with fully-closed control module and external encoders mounted on the machine is a great addition. This type of control scheme can achieve high-accuracy positioning. Servo Accuracy By High Speed Network For a long time, control command of a servo motor was sent by analogue voltage command or pulse train command from master controller. In this case there is a few disadvantages: 1) Limitation of speed like 1Mpps(Pulse Per Second) 2) Not strong enough for noise environment. 3) Cannot read/write Data inside of servo drive from master controller 4) Command cable and feedback cable is required for each servo drivers. Recently Ethernet technology has become common even in the field of factory automation. Many Ethernet communication protocols for servo motor control are available in the market. MECHATROLINK is one of the IEC standard’s for open network protocol. Advantages for this network are: 1) 100Mbps high speed Ethernet communication. 2) Maximum 62 slave nodes can connect to one network. 3) Real-time monitoring of servo drive can be possible 4) All technical documents are open and freely downloaded from the organisation’s web site. •
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at a certain cyclic period. Receiving 125usec interpolation data cycle enables it to follow target trajectory accurately compared to 1msec cycle. Once servo driver received 125usec positioning data, it divides into shorter position control cycle like 62usec motor current control. •
Real-Time Monitoring Of Servo Internal Data Once a controller connects servo drivers by a high speed network, the controller can monitor any information inside of servo drives. For example torque data can be monitored in real time being updated by every scan time. If the controller can monitor the torque data, it is able to detect illegal motor torque due to a mechanical problem. Then the controller can alert the operator that machine maintenance is necessary before it actually breaks down.
Variety Of Servomotors Servomotors can be divided into three types below. Users can maximise their machine performance by selecting a suitable type of motor.
• Rotary motor 125usec high speed servo communication These types of servomotors are mostly In order to improve the accuracy of servo used in a variety of applications. A different control, a high speed network between lineup of motor is suggested to different a controller and servo drives plays an applications. For instance, low inertia and important role. In case of continuous high speed type is suitable to chip mounters path control, when the controller sends which require high response and shorter continues positioning data to servo drives tact time. ÜÖþÄÚÍÇþÇÌþÒÍØÉÖÚÈÖþËÉÌ×ÆØÇÒÅÒÇÃþÙÃþÈÆËËÉÖÈÈÒÍÔþÅÒÙÉÚÇÒÌÍþÌÕþÖÊÆÒËÎÖÍÇø
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PROCESS CONTROL
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Applications
Ideal for applications that require reference tracking performance (high position accuracy) during movement Corner cut without precision with circular command.
Laser processing machine, dispensers, etc.
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Higher Tracking Performance!
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Less Deviation Control Type
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Direct drive motor Compared to a rotary motor, a Direct Drive motor (DD motor) generates larger torque. The motor is designed to couple to a load without reduction gears or a belt mechanism. Therefore the machine with DD motor can achieve high rigidity leading to accurate positioning performance and process a large amount of work piece. The type of DD motor can be largely divided into two types: Coreless type and type with iron core. Coreless type performs smooth running from low to high speed ranges due to less cogging torque. Type with iron core achieves higher torque and shorter tact time. Linear motor Linear motors are used for accurate linear motion such as machine tools and semiconductor exposure apparatuses. Likewise DD motor, linear motor has coreless type and type with iron core. Linear motors have taken measures to improve accuracy by improving its motor structure. The latest linear motor of our products, Model SGLFW2, reduces cogging force 50 percent less compared
DD motor and Linear motor
to earlier models. It realises smoother speed profile and more accurate positioning. While some applications are very sensitive to changes of machine temperature because thermal expansion sometimes matters to ensure accuracy. We have provided water-cooled options to customers such as the semiconductor industry in an attempt to suppress raising temperature of their devices stemming from linear motors. How To Realise Machine Accuracy Improving machine accuracy can be realised by many related products and technologies. The following items are
important issues. 1. High speed and precise motion profile from master controller. 2. High speed and synchronised network from controller to servo drives. 3. Servo motor, DD motor and Linear motor to maximise machine performance. 4. Accurate and precise encoder feedback from actuator to servo drives. 5. Compensation for problems stemming from mechanical property by servo functions which deal with machine vibration, inertia change, resonance noise, ball screw harmonic vibration and so on.
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SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG IoT, Asset Intelligence, Logistics
Enterprise Asset Intelligence IAA SPOKE WITH RYAN GOH, VP OF SALES AND GM, ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES (ASIA PACIFIC) AND IMRAN AKBAR, VP AND GM, ENTERPRISE NETWORKS & COMMUNICATIONS (ENC), ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES, ON THE COMPANYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TECHNOLOGY AND GROWTH, ESPECIALLY AROUND ENTERPRISE ASSET INTELLIGENCE. BY MARK JOHNSTON
Ryan Goh (RG)
Imran Akbar (IA)
Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
ENQUIRY NUMBER
8401
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IAA: Tell me more about some of your solutions? Imran Akbar (IA): I will give you four examples, and that will give you a view as to what is Enterprise Asset Intelligence. If you look into transportation and logistics we have a very large transportation and logistics customer that is using a wearable, and is using our location beacons to improve the loading accuracy, so if a person takes a package into the wrong trailer, it beeps. We are also using applications to make sure the trailer is filled to the limit, so it is not carrying air, because they do not get paid for carrying air. That is an example of Enterprise Asset Intelligence in transportation and logistics. In healthcare, we have location tags that we can attach to an IV pump, a hospital bed, or to an ID card where we can see where the doctors are, where the nurses are, and where the IV pumps are because according to one of the studies that got done last year people did not know where 40 percent of the IV pumps where in a specific hospital. So they did not have the visibility into those assets. As such, providing the visibility of these assets and the people, and healthcare, that is Enterprise Asset Intelligence. We have a very large customer in retail where we are essentially using WiFi for locationing, as well as the bluetooth beacons for locationing so that when you, in a shoe department, for example, get a coupon that is relevant to the shoe department, so that to me is Enterprise Asset Intelligence. And then if you look into hospitality, you can be told what the guests are doing on your property. Build a profile so that I can know what their social likes and dislikes are on social networks. All these things are examples of what Enterprise Asset Intelligence.
IAA: What are your goals and targets for 2016 in regards to Enterprise Asset Intelligence? Ryan Goh (RG): I think APAC is in various stages of growth so we have different plans for different countries but I can try and summerise. A growth sector where we think we can capitalise on is around retail, the next one would be manufacturing, and transport and logistics. Healthcare is important in some countries but not generally across all. Retail, which has picked up, is probably more relevant across all of APAC. This is where we see in regards to Enterprise Asset Intelligence customers who want to get Data Analytics. They want to analyse the data, pick up information from customers who come into the mall so they can make a valid decision. This is where I think the growth is going to come from. There are a lot of customers now who are very interested in location based solutions. Using China as an example, we see a lot of requests on location based solutions, they want to know where the customer is in the mall, and the preference for any products based on where he is going, and can they encourage increased revenue by driving more customers through the offline to online strategy using a location based solution. I think this is an area that we have a key differentiator, and a key focus for us to grow. IAA: What is your growth strategy For Enterprise Asset Intelligence? RG: Enterprise Asset Intelligence is a new category that Zebra Technologies is creating. The first step that Zebra did was to enhance our portfolio and that was through an acquisition. We have a mobile computer, we have sensors, we have wireless, and that basically allows us to own this category. In APAC, for us to own a category, it is really
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about helping the customers understand the value that we can deliver with Enterprise Asset Intelligence. We think that the customers are getting it now because they are understanding the value because of IoT gaining traction now in Asia. We think the market is ready for Enterprise Asset Intelligence. IAA: Apart from IoT, what other trends are you noticing, and how do you see the market evolving over the next year or two? IA: I think that this whole customer engagement thing is just getting started. There is a lot more to do. I do not think it has matured enough. I think it started less than a couple of years ago but I also think that it is going to get more mature, and more robust. I also do think in very specific use cases you will also see a lot of event driven architecture under mediation. What that means is a network, for example, is sensors saying that there is something wrong. The network actually fixes and reports us to what it saw. A lot stuff is still automated so the network is becoming far more intelligent than just providing the speeds and feeds. I also think that we will see a lot of robots coming into play.
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SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Asset Management, Mobility, Digital Tool
Transforming Asset Management Through Mobility MOBILITY IS CHANGING ASSET MANAGEMENT ACROSS MANY SECTORS. FINALCAD HAVE ONE SUCH TECHNOLOGY THAT IS HELPING CONSTRUCTION MANAGERS OPTIMISE THEIR PROCESS FLOWS. BY MARK JOHNSTON
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inalCAD is a mobile app that has been designed to integrate the myriad contractors working on a given construction project and predict delays and cost overruns before they happen. Baptiste Joyeaux, head of international development at FinalCAD, explained to IAA how the app is at the forefront of a digital technology revolution transforming the stadiums and venues industry. IAA: Could you tell me more about your company? Baptiste Joyeaux (BJ): FinalCAD is a France based company. We have an office in Singapore. What we are trying to do is transform the construction industry and how to make it better and how to improve it. We are on the technological side of it, with bringing mobile devices on site
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ENQUIRY NUMBER
8402 Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
and how we can help people on site and help the entire industry there. IAA: Tell me more about your solution? BJ: We have created a mobile work solution trying to help people on site to get the job done better, quicker and on time, which is a big problem in the industry. We are trying to
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
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automate the processes by bringing mobile devices on site and make it easy for everyone to use it as well.
IAA: I understand you recently opened an office in Singapore. What are your plans for this region? BJ: In Singapore, we started with the Singapore Sports Hub, which brought us here. We seen a huge potential in this region. We got involved with the Singapore Sports Hub project because we have a deep relationship with the main contractor. They brought us here to transform their fully paper based processes. IAA: What are your plans for this region? Are you expanding? BJ: We are now a registered company in Singapore, which will be our focus. We are also looking for projects in the surrounding countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia as well. IAA: What countries are you based in? BJ: Most of our revenue is coming from the French market and the European market. Now we also have this office in Singapore. IAA: How many people do you employ? BJ: We have 50 people in the company but we are expanding a lot.
Steve Campbell, San Francisco, CA, at
IAA: What do you offer that other competitors do not? BJ: What we do is really to help the customer be more effective, and more efficient, by providing the right content at the right time for them to operate, and for them to operate more efficiently and better as well. The industry is all about information and how you can get the right information for you to operate on time while not sacrificing on quality. We are reinventing the content, like the drawings content to make it mobile and to make it more accessible to people on site. Making the right information accessible through mobile devices.
Digital tools suppress the need for duplicated data entries, which a highly time consuming and error-prone. IAA: What other projects are you involved in within Singapore? BJ: We are doing, as an example, the Changi General Hospital extension. There we provide a solution for the whole project lifecycle, from the foundation until handover. It has been a good experience for us. We brought some specific features there and specific value to the project team. That was a very important project for us and for Singapore. We have also just signed for our first partnership with Woh Hup Construction. When we demonstrated the value they can get from our solution they really understood how we could put them in front, and how we could leverage technology for their
people on site. And not only people at C-level or at the office but people on site and how to really get the job done. IAA: What is the next phase of development? Where do you go with this? BJ: We have got one solution here on site, which has been a huge success for us. We have over 6,000 projects in 25 countries and what we want to do now is to get the power of this system, and all the power of the data that we have been capturing to get them back to the companies we are working for. To get insight from this data and to see what we can learn from it. This is really the next stage for us to leverage data for automation.
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SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Asset Management, Data Visualisation, Analysis
Information must be relevant, timely and collaborative. The more you uncover â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the more you can discover, enabling process manufacturers to efficiently resolve operational issues to remain profitable.
The Intelligent Explorer
DISCOVERING THE VALUE OF DATA VISUALISATION SOFTWARE. BY DR WARREN BECRAFT, SENIOR PRINCIPAL BUSINESS CONSULTANT, ASPENTECH ASIA PACIFIC
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sset effectiveness is the essence of running a profitable operation in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s highly-competitive market. The primary measure of business performance is the ability to intelligently assess real-time production data in a way that contextualises, visualises, reports and shares information, while enabling operators to make the right decisions affecting operational performance. For many chemical companies, batch analysis often fails to provide the ability to visualise data in flexible formats and to incorporate Got a Question? characteristic data to Make An Enquiry. ENQUIRY NUMBER identify and correct the root causes of operational problems. Manufacturing Execution Turn to page 72a to enquire Systems (MES) software or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com delivers knowledge
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that optimises processes and opens up the opportunity to explore and discover all possibilities, including the use of web-enabled data analysis capabilities to understand issues quickly. By identifying and adopting best practices and implementing collaborative and integrated technology into the business, companies can readily transfer vital knowledge across the operation from equipment engineering to process engineering, which ensures continuous improvement initiatives. MES software allows organisations to collect, manage and leverage vast volumes of production data to provide operational intelligence, via rich visualisation and analytics, for improved production execution, effectively turning the data into usable and tailored information.
Discovering Knowledge Through the process of discovery, we understand the unknown and make sense of our environment. Process manufacturers generate data on a second-by-second basis and therefore, need to use intelligent MES software to display tag data, view trends and graphics, as well as analyse plant performance using the most innovative operations data visualisation capabilities available. Often, too much time is spent by knowledge-seekers trying to find relevant information, correcting errors and using data sources that are unreliable. Purposeful information must be relevant, timely and collaborative. Being able to share pertinent data to make better and faster decisions will give companies the competitive edge and allow operations to be more agile to respond to changes,
producing more effective execution. Every moment of time is critical in manufacturing. MES software, which is fast, flexible and easy-to-use, can give company operations a timely and in-depth understanding of asset performance. By quickly discovering issues using advanced analytic functionalities and tapping into business intelligence, it is possible to minimise response times to production issues, as well as improve overall equipment effectiveness and turn the acquired data
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
into profit for every minute of the day. The Intelligent Explorer Context makes analysis meaningful. Having information displayed in a logical, easy-to-understand manner with the appropriate tools enables operations to influence optimal outcomes. Solving problems quickly, therefore, is essential to meet customer demand and to be competitive. With effective ways to explore — you will deliver much more. Modern MES software enables manufacturers to easily exchange real-time information between the shop floor, through the enterprise and up to the executive boardroom. With an integrated infrastructure, manufacturers can utilise available operational data to maintain and improve quality standards, adopt best practices and achieve operational excellence. Many leading companies have adopted MES software solutions to increase profitability, reduce variability and improve overall asset utilisation. Such data management capabilities puts information at your fingertips, anytime and anywhere, by collecting and organising process data across disparate systems and distributes it across the enterprise to make it easy to optimise the value of the data. Software solutions that collect and store large volumes of real-time and historical data from process control, manufacturing operations, laboratory systems and business systems form the foundation for an enterprise-level platform. Rich calculations, analytic and visualisation tools unlock the data’s value, allowing operators to compare performance across a range of assets and disseminate best practices to processes and sites that require improvement. As a scalable and flexible solution, the data historian software delivers enterprise-wide global deployments across hundreds of locations. MES software solutions also provide secure access from any device connected to the network without
the need for client-side add-ins or software installation. Users have the ability to choose between desktop, laptop, tablets and smartphones, so they are always in touch with their production data, anytime and anywhere. Such solutions intelligently help to provide context that drives effective analysis, builds asset hierarchies that simplify monitoring and diagnostics, as well as expands batch and event visualisation. With dynamic gauges, dials and other dashboard elements, operations can deliver performance dashboards that are lightning-fast and quickly convey important information in one platform. Chemical companies around the globe use these MES tools to make better and faster decisions, driven by a comprehensive view of production operations to maximise asset effectiveness. Adding context to analyses helps identify root causes, such as batch variability, for faster problem resolution and enables operators to take corrective actions to preserve product quality. The advantages of MES software solutions include: • Searches across a wide set of data sources and content types, including production records, alarms, graphics, trends, ad hoc tag lists and comments to locate all pertinent information • Looks at data by production segment, event or batch within a single tool • Events are flexible and users can plot periods of time where operators have placed comment markers or where alarms exist • Gives mobile workers, managers and executives access to current production information on their laptops, desktop, tablet or smartphone with a true thin client solution • Produces dashboards tailored for different users’ needs within minutes • Understands batch variability
SOFTWARE & NETWORKS
more easily; over time, within batch and batch-to-batch Explore. Dream. Discover. Manufacturers are constantly searching for ways to preserve margins, improve product quality and make optimal use of global assets. Now is the time to ensure your operation is fully equipped with intelligent MES technology to better understand what is going on in the plant. Interestingly, Mark Twain, the American author (1835 – 1910), once said: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Having access to secure production data from any device connected to your network without the need for client-side software is no longer just a dream, but a reality. Being able to see the bigger picture and discover vital information helps solve production issues fast. An effective MES system lets you visualise processes, event and alarm data in a consolidated view, so each user can share data from their production operations. MES software solutions incorporate features for batch visualisation and help spot process and product variation to identify poor quality batches. Contextual data can now be viewed alongside process data to provide production teams with the required information to maximise production assets — a truly intelligent solution to explore and discover ways to make more profit.
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December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
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ARTICLE TAG Alarm Management, Standards, Recommendations
hen people have to deal with a large number of frequent alarms on a regular basis fatigue can set in. The operator can become, in a sense, desensitised to them. This is a problem, especially when these alarms could be the result of something very serious in an industrial environment. If the operator became desensitised to the alarms then this could result in a longer response time, and even missing important alarms. Every industry that deals with frequent alarms are affected by this, including the construction and mining sector, as well as healthcare, and the process sector. Such frequent alarms in a sense robs the most important alarms from surfacing, alarms that spell danger or could even become life threatening if ignored. In the healthcare sector, the constant alarms from anything from blood pressure machines to ventilators cause the tuning out of these alarms because of their frequency. This can cause particular problems for healthcare professionals. There is also evidence to suggest that too many alarms increases workload, interferes with communication, and ultimately wastes time. Some suggestions to improving alarm fatigue include changing the sounds to a softer and friendlier tone in order to identify alarms by the sound. Another solution is to add an additional layer of software to analyse what alarms are truly important, and to minimise false alarms, which can also happen.
A Look At Alarm Fatigue
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Credit: Ove Tøpfer, Fredrikstad, Ă&#x2DC;stfold, lb
ALARM FATIGUE IS A COMMON PROBLEM IN INDUSTRIES THAT USE A LOT OF ALARMS. THE PROPER MANAGEMENT OF ALARMS IS REQUIRED IN ORDER TO AVOID BECOMING FATIGUED.
The Problem The problem is there are too many alarms, a lot of which are not that important or at least not in need of an urgent response. Because of the complex systems that occupy much of process automation, even a small disruption in a comprehensive system can lead to a quick succession of alarms. This is a problem as too many alarms can cause confusion to an operator. Knowing what to attend to
first is critical. Knowing how serious each alarm is is also critical. Another point to consider is that too much information can overload the capacity of the operator to think clearly about what to do next. This may lead the operator to make the wrong decision and ultimately cause a dip in production and possible damage to installations or products. There have in fact been studies done which look at the maximum number of alarms that an operator can handle in a given period of time. It is described in the Engineering Equipment and Materials User Association Publication 191, and is further defined in the new IEC 6268.2 directive, effective as of October 19, 2014. This directive is an important legal support should unforeseen calamities occur, just like the norm for programming, ISA S 18. Solutions Some of the most recent developments include using data to decipher the correct action to take. This includes elements of big data analytics and data mining. These solutions work by finding patterns in the data in order to take the appropriate action, rather than manually checking thousands of lines in an excel spreadsheet, which has been done in the past. Why do so many alarms trigger at once? Well this may be a case of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;conditional alarmingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. As an example, if one part of a process plant is broken this may cause a cascade of alarms in other parts of the plant. Fluctuations
Karoly Feher, Budapest, Bp, bt
Alarm management is a top priority in the process sector.
in temperature can also cause some alarms to sound, most of which are unnecessary. Using analytics here, will reduce greatly the number of alarms the operator has to deal with. Another way alarm management has been described is it is the commitment operating companies make to stakeholders that safety is a critical focus of the operation and they have the necessary steps to ensure that the mismanagement of the alarms will not be the primary reason for any abnormal situation. Auditing is also worth considering. It is also important to realise that the purpose of implementing alarm management is not just about achieving the key performance indicators called for in standards and best practices, but ensuring that the established system realises the process benefits. The alarm system should be an enabler of consistent and safe operation rather than a burden on the operation with additional administrative processes. The audit results should thus highlight the achievements of the overall established alarm management practices, such as improvements in the response time in abnormal situations. Auditing alarm management practices also tells operating companies the status of a control system to ensure safe and reliable processes. The audit is done for compliance to international standards and best practices and internal procedures. Organisations use audit
Credit: Rob Rosenhamer, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, at
INSTRUMENTATION & MEASUREMENT
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Over the last several years, alarm management has become a highly important topic, which can affect productivity and the health of the operator.
results to develop and improve the alarm system and the performance of the personnel working with the alarm system to meet the objectives of the alarm philosophy. In Conclusion Alarm management is highly important and is not just a nuisance but can affect productivity and ultimately the health and wellbeing of the operator. It needs to be well sought out with only the important alarms that need attended to surfaced while the unimportant or false alarms are hidden or highlighted only when needed.
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ENERGY
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Smart Grid, Research, Asia
Developing A Smarter Grid For Asia IAA INTERVIEWED ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ASHWIN M KHAMBADKONE, PROGRAMME DIRECTOR OF THE EXPERIMENTAL POWER GRID CENTRE (EPGC) IN SINGAPORE ON THE EPGC AND THE LATEST RESEARCH AT THE CENTRE. BY MARK JOHNSTON
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ssociate Professor Ashwin Khambadkone is the project director for the Experimental Power Grid Centre (EPGC) in Singapore, who was appointment to the position in 2010. He is also a facility member at the National University of Singapore (NUS). IAA: Could you tell me more about some of the research that you do at the EPGC? AK: We have our core areas of research, which are Power Grid based, Power Electronics based, or System based. Some of the key things that we have done is to look at the renewable integration problem. We have worked very closely with the Energy Market Authority (EMA) of Singapore to look at Solar Penetration in Singapore and what are the limits and how does the intermittency and uncertainty impact the grid, which helped EMA to determine the new intermittent generation threshold limit, which used to be 350MW. It was extended to 600MW but currently there is no limit, as such. One of our key inputs was how does the variability due to PV impact the Singapore Got a Question? grid, and this Make An Enquiry. came from our ENQUIRY NUMBER understanding of and the experience we gained from Turn to page 72a to enquire running our grid or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com here. This helped
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us to understand the dynamics. We used our own PV data along with PV data from Singapore, and then the interaction of grid stability. The modelling was done here. That is one of the key areas. We have developed very strong capability in microgrids. These microgrids could be off grid systems which are small grids which are not connected to the main grid, but we can also work on microgrids which are interconnected with the main grid, so these are like distributed generation. Both have their roles. The microgrid which if off grid is more for a remote area type of system. One of our clients is currently
A*STARâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Experimental Power Grid Centre (EPGC) in Singapore.
building a 1.5MW microgrid in the Philippines and they worked very closely with us. We helped them in the design verification and also operations strategy. Off grid systems are also seen in transportation, for example, electric ships, electric aircraft, and so on, because we have this capability in the microgrid area we are also working with other companies in marine as well as in aerospace. IAA: You mentioned microgrids in relation to ships, does your work extend to electric vehicles as well? AK: Yes, but a big ship is almost like a floating city and so the network is very complex; it is basically like a grid. An electric vehicle is very small. We have capabilities in that area. Our microgrid capability fills the gap in the large systems we are working on. I have told you about renewable integration, I have told you about the microgrids, the other area of research we look at is storage and its impact on microgrids. We also have now a Combined Heat Power (CHP) system within the EPGC. This was not there when we opened. We have extended that. We are using waste heat to produce chilled water which helps in cooling. The EPGC is becoming a full
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
fledged very flexible test bed platform. The EPGC from its opening in 2011 has expanded its capabilities with a real time simulator, with the motor test bed facility and with CHP systems and an integrated test platform. IAA: What are some of the results that have came out of this research? AK: Most of the work has been done with companies. One of the key research results which I have mentioned was how to pave the way for renewable integration in the Singapore grid. There are other areas like medium voltage inverters. We are working with a company on medium voltage. These are power electronic equipments which can be connected to medium voltage which is somewhere between 6.6KV to 22KV. This currently can only be connected to transformers. IAA: You mentioned microgrids being particularly applicable to more isolated areas, so how would microgrids be used in more urbanised settings like Singapore? AK: The capability of microgrids for Singaporeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case is we have some islands where we can have islanded microgrids but in addition to that we
are also looking at grid connected microgrids. So it is a distributed generation system and you can be grid connected but you can have a lot of distributed generation which in Singaporeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case would be predominantly solar, batteries, and perhaps gas. This allows various options available for energy efficiency as well as high reliability. While we are looking at problems in relation to Singapore, we are also working with companies based in Singapore who are looking at markets elsewhere. IAA: Could microgrids be used to improve energy security since they are in a sense separated from the main grid? AK: It is very variable. What happens is there are off grid systems in rural areas where electrification has not reached and that is one area. Of course it does not directly link to Singapore but again it is a question of what is available out there and if Singapore companies can leverage on this technology they can go there. I think in addition to that, highly urbanised grids with distributed generation I believe is the energy security part you are referring to. In some places where there is disruption
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One of our key inputs was how does the variability due to PV impact the Singapore grid, and this came from our understanding of the experience we gained from running our grid here.
Solar energy is one of the most viable renewable energy sources appropriate for Singapore.
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ENERGY due to various reasons you can have islanded systems like that which can run. However, I would not call it energy security because that term is used in a different context in energy. But yes, security is one aspect, and we are working towards some of the technologies. It depends on how you do the architectural design in relation to security. There could be an option of business as usual running where you want to run it at high efficiency, lowest cost, and then you could have various contingency scenarios and it has to go from that contingency scenario back to business as usual so all this requires strategies and algorithms which can do the transition really stably. IAA: What is meant by ‘smart’, in relation to the grid and is there an ongoing rollout in relation to the smart grid in Singapore? AK: The smart grid is an evolutionary process so if we talk about Singapore, the Singapore grid is quite smart, and that is why it has one of the best performances in the world. What is
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Smartness in a grid? Essentially if you look at the grid as a living being it will have have muscles and nerves and so on and then it will have an information system which is the brain. The smartness comes in how we should make use of the information system to make smart decisions. These smart decisions could be driven by various driving factors, such as, energy efficiency, or it could be security. It could be minimisation or increase of renewables, or so on. As such, that is the general concept of the smart grid. You need smartness at the generation end, you need smartness in the transmission and distribution end, and you need smartness at the user end. The evolution is happening in all these areas. IAA: I have heard there are plans for a smart grid across ASEAN countries. Could you tell me more about this project? AK: I cannot speak about what stage that project is at as it is at a much higher level. However, let us look at it from Singapore’s point of view today and in the near future. What is the advantage of interlinking transnational grids? It is to improve the reliability of your grid and the stability of your grid. At the current moment, for Singapore, because the way it has been designed right from the beginning it is a highly reliable grid, so the need for the ASEAN grid is not as important as other countries in the region.
Modelling Smart Grid behaviour requires a lot of processing power.
IAA: Singapore is talking a lot about becoming the world’s first smart nation. How does this initiative relate to smart grids and has your direction changed since the smart nation announcement? AK: With the smart nation and the smart urban living spaces what we are looking at are systems which are distributed so that is why even when I talk about grids or distributed generation, I am talking about a highly urbanised scenario. The microgrid example that I gave is not just for microgrids for rural areas and is completely different from distributed generation and smart grids within the urban scenario. Within the urban scenario if you build in distributed generation and let the intelligence and control spread out in a distributed way, what it can do is two things, one is the security and the fact it can decouple and couple again at any time. The second part is that In the future grids, the change or the disruption due to new technologies is going to happen in a distributed fashion because the PV is distributed. The EV and all this storage and local optimisation is all distributed. As such, for everything to be controlled centrally and optimised for the classical grid does will move from that to a distributed intelligent system, so you will have smart urbanised grids which are within themselves quite intelligent and they can combine which each other, optimise, and because they have resources, they can buy and sell power in the energy market. People today call it demand response. That can be done when you aggregate all these services together into this. We have been coining this term called building to grids.
The Singapore grid is quite smart, and that is why it has one of the best performances in the world.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ENERGY
A LOOK BACK AT THE ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE EXPERIMENTAL POWER GRID CENTRE
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ingapore: The Experimental Power Grid Centre (EPGC), one of the largest experimental power grid facilities in the world was officially opened in Singapore by S. Iswaran, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Home Affairs and Trade & Industry. Located on Jurong Island, EPGC, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s (A*STAR’s) centre for energy research is established to support Singapore’s goal toward developing a smart energy economy. The facility will pave the way for cutting-edge research and research collaborations with local and international partners to develop future energy technologies in areas of electrical power networks and energy distribution and renewable energy resources, for eventual commercialisation. At the opening , A*STAR’s EPGC signed a research collaboration agreement with SP PowerGrid and three MOUs respectively with Housing Development Board (HDB), Meidensha Corporation Japan and National Instruments. These agreements span research in varied fields, including renewable energy integration, advanced high efficiency inverters and smart grid control, with the aim of developing robust, cutting-edge solutions that can be quickly adopted and implemented. The research collaboration with SP PowerGrid will study how to improve the reliability of the grid to enable SP PowerGrid to continue delivering worldclass power reliability and quality. “SP PowerGrid is pleased to work with EPGC, a leading research institute in electricity grid-related technologies, to explore and develop new smart grid technologies that are robust and yet cost-effective for our operations,” said Sim Kwong Mian, MD, SP PowerGrid. HDB is another local partner that is leveraging EPGC’s R&D capabilities
to jointly explore the integration of renewable energy for public housing. Beyond local partners, EPGC has also attracted the interest of international companies like National Instruments and Meidensha. US-based company National Instruments will be collaborating with EPGC to develop advanced measurement and control technologies for smart grids. Chandran Nair, MD, National Instruments, said: “National Instruments sees EPGC as a valuable research partner for developing advanced solutions for distribution automation and real-time smart grid controllers to cater for high renewable energy penetration.” Meidensha, a Japanese manufacturer in the heavy electric industry, will engage in research with EPGC to develop high efficiency control technology for advanced medium voltage inverters that are used in industrial pumps and fans. This latest public-private partnerships will add to existing collaborations forged with Vestas and Rolls Royce, during the centre’s groundbreaking in July 2010. Vestas has already completed a project with EPGC to co-develop technologies to enhance the capabilities of wind turbines. Rolls Royce has begun research on marine grid system with EPGC. Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman, A*STAR, said: “The launch of EPGC is timely with the increasing global demand for renewable energy and innovative energy transmission and networks. EPGC provides a unique research platform for public-private partnerships to develop future energy and smart grid solutions. The collaborations that we have developed signal the immense potential EPGC offers to industry partners and public agencies to translate research into novel energy solutions to create value for Singapore. These will not only transform Singapore into a smart energy
economy, but also make an impact in the international energy landscape, establishing Singapore as Asia’s Innovation Capital.” EPGC is also working closely with local stakeholders such as its partner agencies including the Economic Development Board, Energy Market Authority (EMA), JTC Corporation and National Environment Agency to create Singapore’s smart grid value chain from R&D initiation to commercial test-bedding and eventual technology adoption. Chee Hong Tat, Chief Executive, EMA, said: “EMA will continue to work closely with EPGC to conduct research and analysis on smart grid technologies. Examples of collaboration projects include the Intelligent Energy System pilot and the Pulau Ubin Micro-grid Testbed. These efforts will help to enhance our grid operations, which would support the deployment of intermittent renewable energy sources and provide greater scope for consumers to reduce their energy consumption.” Associate Professor Ashwin Khambadkone, Programme Director, EPGC said: “The EPGC focuses on research to develop solutions for quick adoption. It is designed to be flexible to allow various power networks to be configured within the facility. In addition, EPGC can facilitate research in the integration of renewables with its unique ability to replicate the power output of renewable energy sources at any time and any place through its wind turbine and solar PV emulators. At 1 Megawatt, power sufficient for 500 households, near grid-like conditions can be created in EPGC, making it a preferred platform for researchers, industry and public agencies to find solutions for a cleaner, more efficient and reliable electric power.”
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SECTOR SPOTLIGHT
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Pat Herman
ARTICLE TAG Power Plants, Infrastructure, Software
A NEW GENERATION OF VIRTUAL POWER PLANTS
THIS ARTICLE AIMS TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING KEY QUESTIONS: HOW IS THE ELECTRICITY ENERGY MARKET TRANSFORMING, HOW ARE VPPS CHANGING TO MEET THE OPPORTUNITIES ENABLED BY THESE TRANSFORMATIONS, AND WHICH SUPPLIERS OF NEXT-GENERATION VPP SOLUTIONS ARE BEST PLACED TO MEET THE VARYING NEEDS OF THE MARKET? BY EMIL BERTHELSEN, PRINCIPAL ANALYST AT MACHINA RESEARCH 1. Transformation Is A Necessity For The Energy Sector The world demand for energy is growing: according to the US Energy Information Administration, world energy consumption is set to increase by 56 percent between 2010 and 2040. The energy market is in a state of flux. Residential users are increasingly generating their own energy and looking to sell power back to the grid, public and private organisations are looking to manage their energy demand more Got a Question? Make An Enquiry. intelligently, ENQUIRY NUMBER and there is an anticipated massive spike in demand Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: imminent from
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the growth of electric vehicles. The grid is moving from being a unidirectional network of energy supply from the centralised power stations to the end users, to a significantly more complex and multidirectional network of energy balancing which can only be addressed with connected energy management solutions. Four technology vectors are transforming the energy market: •
Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) — The adoption of renewable and alternative energy resources has grown significantly in recent years, driven by falling equipment prices and government subsidies. These distributed and intermittent energy resources
•
will require integration into a wider grid infrastructure. As well as changing production, this has also changed the way that energy is consumed, with the growth of ‘prosumers’: both producers and consumers of energy. In conjunction with the increasing penetration of smart meters and the emergence of microgrids, innovative energy consumption and production models will emerge in localised areas, such as the SmartCity Rheintal initiative. Demand Response (DR) — Traditionally the energy market has been demand driven, and supplies had to match that demand. Future demand is predicted to substantially
SECTOR SPOTLIGHT
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
•
and control the sheer volume of distributed energy resources and demand response devices through traditional embedded control room approaches. New abstracted approach will see the management of IT and OT tasks through service requests rather than direct control routines, allowing for a more scalable, flexible, and agile approach. Energy Trading (ET) — As energy markets adjust for increased liberalisation, operators and customers are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities in energy trading, as occurs today within specialised energy exchanges such as the European Energy Exchange or the Southwest Power Pool in the US. Real-time data from connected DERs, and DR solutions, enable a more finely calibrated and realtime energy trading approach.
No longer limited to ‘day ahead’ markets and trading, energy trading is set to significantly transform energy markets. The opportunities from this transformation are significant. Grid operators will look to save substantial maintenance costs on distribution and transmission networks while utilities will identify opportunities to deliver new services and engage in new ways with end users. ‘Prosumers’ will look to gain financial benefits from better tariffs. Enterprises will notice operational improvements in terms of reduced network failures and financial improvements in terms of better energy management. 2. There Are Three Main Types Of VPPs With Very Different Characteristics Based on the changes outlined in Section 1, there is increasing demand for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to
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mismatch with supply at peak times, leading to increasing requirements for ‘demand response’ solutions that actively manage demand to reduce peaks. For instance, energy suppliers may be able to time-shift the power consumption of connected cooling units in a refrigeration plant to balance overall network demand with available supply levels. The customers could be expected to benefit from reduced power bills in return for their flexibility. Demand response could also be used to consume surplus energy created by distributed energy resources. Demand response ushers in a plethora of opportunities for disruption and innovation in energy markets. Convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) — It will be nearly impossible to manage
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December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Figure 1: Four vectors driving energy market transformations [Source: Machina Research, 2014]
manage the array of decentralised energy production, demand response and energy storage. But not all VPP approaches are the same. Machina Research has identified three models: 1. Operational Control (OC) VPP model — Traditional VPPs have strengths in directly managing the information and operational technologies of centralised power plants. In this model, operational control VPP solutions directly manage single or multiple power plants, and aggregate distributed energy resources into a single energy pool, creating essentially large, centralised power stations. In this approach, direct operational control of single assets in energy production remains key. 2. Functional Management (FM) VPP model — Permits the tackling of any of the four technology vectors outlined in Section 1, ie: aggregation of distributed energy resources, the management of demand response and the inclusion of energy storage or energy trading tools.
management tool for the growing array of connected DERs, DRs and DESs, enabled and enhanced by intelligent software solutions, integrating information and operational technologies and extending services to include commercial solutions. What differentiates this model from earlier ones is the fundamental change from a single control room managed environment to a decentralised intelligent software managed environment where service requests are issued to larger and smaller plants enabling the components of smart energy markets to take, interact and fulfil requests. The most important development occurring today is the shift from the FM model to the SEME model. This new generation of VPPs is defined by three specific approaches to the market related to 1) the level of abstraction, 2) flexibility in service request management and 3) the creation of aggregated profiles.
3. Smart Energy Market Enablement (SEME) VPP model — This new generation of VPP will deliver a
1) Level of Abstraction. As the management of energy availability extends beyond the operational
confines of control rooms in centralised power stations, operators will require new tools to manage the new levels of complexity and scale. From planning, monitoring and managing the data within a single power station (or a group of them), operators will need to manage similar tasks across potentially millions of connected energy-producing resources, billions of connected energy consuming units (as part of demand response solutions), and millions of storage facilities. Complexity will increase too, driven by the requirements for energy trading. To manage this transformation, providers of new generation VPPs will need to approach the transforming energy market with innovative and flexible enablement platforms, abstracted from the intricacies and operational management of the devices, e.g. by controlling the system instead of single parameters of a CHP. 2) Flexibility in service request management. The priority for the new generation of VPPs will be to manage service requests across entire systems of connected devices. The aim will be to secure delivery fulfillment of service requests where possible, and if not achievable through initial requests, then proceed to issue and manage service change requests throughout the system; in essence, a highly flexible optimisation system. One example of this would be where the VPP operator would ‘request’ a given amount of energy from a renewable energy source, and if they are not able to draw the full amount of energy from that source, they could alternatively combine it with other sources, or look for an entirely separate source to fulfill the request. This differs significantly from the single asset approach where lack of fulfillment would be an incomplete task without the inherent flexibility of the new generation of VPPs. 3) Aggregated profiles. New VPP systems must leverage data from the increasing number of individual energy production and consumption profiles generated by connected resources
SECTOR SPOTLIGHT
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Figure 2: Three models of VPP [Source: Machina Research, 2014]
which are subject to essentially random effects (usually the weather in the cases of wind and solar energy). To gain the greatest benefits from renewable energy resources and ‘enable’ the inclusion of these energy sources in power grids, enablers of functionally managed VPPs have developed a range of highly specialised tools including weather forecasting to assist not only in the prediction of consumed energy but also in the prediction of produced energy loads and voltage and VoltAmpere Reactive optimisation systems for energy distribution across the grids.
to optimise supply and demand characteristics in near real time. One approach to analysing this data in an aggregated manner is for operators to have at their disposal detailed overall profiles of the aggregated supply and demand side of the energy market with suitable tolerance levels. Such market tolerance levels are set based on the fact that each connected device will have an energy supply or demand profile, and for each profile, tolerance bands can be set to ensure that the requirements of the individual device are always met. For instance, it may be permissible to turn down office air conditioning when electricity supplies are low, but it may not be permissible to turn down factory refrigeration storage units for an extended period of time. Once new VPP systems begin to aggregate more and more connected devices, the combined profile of device estates will allow operators to operate on the basis of the combined profiles, which collectively define a required performance envelope for the overall VPP network. As VPP operators look to manage discrete energy markets, these aggregated profiles will deliver two significant advantages: •
operators will achieve improved efficiency given the increased latitude that they
•
will have in ensuring balanced loads across their grids, and in aggregating the production and consumption profiles, operators have in effect anonymised the individual profiles, creating an additional opportunity, subject to regulation, to monetise and apply the data for further usage, eg: to let shopping malls or retail stores participate in demand response programs.
3. Segmenting VPPs In The Market Machina Research has identified a number of key criteria to segment the VPP market. These criteria are grouped into seven categories. The first four categories relate to dealing with the four key changes in the energy market as outlined in Section 1, and represent ostensibly the key requirements and features (see figure 3) of the Functional Management VPP: 1. Distributed Energy Resource Management — The inclusion and connection of DERs has been a complex challenge for functional management VPPs as compared to traditional power plants where energy production is fairly stable and predictable. In fact, it still is a challenge for all VPPs. Renewable energy sources produce relatively intermittent low voltage power loads
2. Demand Response Management — Functional Management VPPs allow for the remote management of demand and the balancing of consumption with production. By having both supply and demand sides closely integrated and connected in real-time, FM VPPs are able to manage the flow of energy in a predictable, planned and structured fashion. The ability to predict supply and demand within local grids within for example 15 minute time intervals has significantly altered the traditional ‘day ahead’ energy trading mechanisms that have dominated up until now. 3. Distributed Energy Storage Management — In the Functional Management VPP model, energy is included as an active component to balance supply short-falls due to uncertainties in generation forecasts. One potential example of this is the potential to link future estates of electric vehicles connected to the grid, and to use onboard batteries as storage facilities. Clearly power consumption and demand from electric vehicles will form an integral part of the forecasting and control infrastructure required as part of functionally managed VPPs. 4. Energy Trading Management — The capabilities of functionally managed VPP solutions can be further enhanced by adding energy trading systems and including more commercial
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SECTOR SPOTLIGHT capabilities, such as pricing, alongside the technical capabilities of the FM VPP. Energy trading will encompass the pricing, contracting and billing of energy within the constraints of any relevant regulations and governance procedures. Such constraints will potentially differ from market to market, and could also involve targets for the use of renewable energy. Energy trading solutions will be highly dependent on real-time information from all connected solutions and devices, and will need to be able to predict, monitor and manage real-time data with significant financial implications. The other three categories are linked to the next generation of Smart Energy Market Enablement VPPs. These will deliver new capabilities for future energy markets as well as create the opportunity to offer new services and undertake new business models. The new generation of VPPs will be software driven, managing the growing numbers of connected devices. These may be connected energy resources, energy consumption or storage units or systems that enable the efficient flow of energy across the grids (through grid stabilisation). As a result of the solution being increasingly software and service request driven, the new generation of VPPs will facilitate opportunities and improvements in related areas. The three factors are: 5. Data analytics and management – One of the significant drivers of change between the earlier versions of VPPs and the latest generation relates to data and data management. The new generation of VPPs does not attempt to manage the detailed and expansive amount of operational control centre data, and so avoids the challenge of becoming overwhelmed by massive data volumes. Instead, new VPPs will access and leverage abstracted data as appropriate and required to manage the overall solution as well as generate the appropriate service requests. But one of the significant differences in approach of smart energy enablement
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
VPPs is that the level of abstraction fundamentally changes the rules around the analysis and management of the data, and establishes a different approach to data analytics and management, with a focus on identifying patterns for predictive maintenance and in order to simulate and optimise the system.
Figure 3: Changing features of VPPs [Source: Machina Research, 2014]
6. System development agility – Less a feature of the new generation of VPPs specifically and more of the changing environment in the energy market, the requirements in terms of system development are moving from complex and ‘heavy’ programming environments to substantially more flexible and agile solutions. As more and more connected devices become part of the solution, VPPs will need to remain flexible and agile to these market developments. As such, system development agility will be key in the new generation of VPPs. 7. User billing relations — Driven not only by smart metering but also by the participation of contributors to the energy grid through DERs, end user billing relations will need to be managed in increasingly complex structures within VPPs. More sophisticated management processes and data for user billing relations will be developed to help end users to identify advantageous tariffs, and for energy trading to become financially successful in the longer term. As illustrated in Figure 3, features in VPPs will develop from narrow capability ranges within the Operational Control VPP to substantially wider and far-reaching capabilities to the Smart Energy Market Enabler VPP, across a full
range of criteria. These changes will also open new and additional market opportunities in VPPs for energy aggregators, adding additional pressure on traditional plant operators to change. A Final Word…About The Internet Of Things Machina Research recognises recent developments in VPPs as examples of developments towards the Internet of Things (IoT). From closed and fairly monolithic architectures, the Internet of Things has embraced scalability, openness, and flexibility, and aims to leverage significant benefits from connected devices. We expect that the new generation of VPPs will leverage both the benefits of this new environment of connected devices and enable the creation of new and innovative services. As in the IoT, VPPs are designed to connect devices or units. These ‘things’ and connections are managed through various platforms, recognising and working with specific operating systems, protocols and services. This article is based on a White Paper published by Machina Research in October 2014. To access the full version, visit the company’s site: https://machinaresearch.com/news/whitepaper-a-new-generation-of-virtual-powerplants-is-set-to-transform-the-energy-sector/
SECTOR SPOTLIGHT FEATURE
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Machine Vision, IoT, Manufacturing
A CLEAR VISION FOR INDUSTRIAL IOT
IAA INTERVIEWED SCOTT SUMMERVILLE, PRESIDENT, MICROSCAN, ON MACHINE VISION AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS (IIOT) FOR HIS COMPANY. BY SYED SHAH IAA: What are your thoughts on the increasing relevance of machine vision in manufacturing? Scott Summerville (SS): There is a lot more capability to create demand and solve customer issues when you are talking about intelligent sensing devices like machine vision smart cameras with fully-featured software. These tools are what I would categorise as advanced manufacturing, and I would consider PLC-driven process machinery as a more base-level automation. There are a lot of companies that install automation systems to achieve acceptable product quality levels, or simply because human interaction is no longer sufficient to do things like building cars and making steel. That being said, machine vision technology is still highly discretionary. It is not necessarily a requirement, because you could potentially accomplish your quality goals through manual inspection (although it is not as tireless or accurate). The same goes for barcode reading for traceability — it is highly efficient, but it is not necessarily mandatory. It is incumbent upon us as the manufacturing supplier to help the customer justify Return On Investment (ROI) and demonstrate the benefits of our automation technology.
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IAA: Could you explain more about the difference between ‘mandatory’ and ‘discretionary’? SS: There are some regulatory requirements, particularly in the life sciences, that are beginning to require unique device identification for items like medical devices and pharmaceuticals. These requirements are mandatory and will soon be applied as a global standard. The use of machine vision and barcode reading for traceability is largely discretionary. There is enough impetus to put in traceability systems to ensure that the products manufactured reach their intended destination and they can be tracked and traced directly to the consumer in the event that there is a recall. This is not necessarily mandated, but many manufacturers (if they have had any experience with recalls) they know that it is important to have traceability systems in place. This is especially true for consumer-driven products like cars where
there could be accidents involved, or food products or pharmaceuticals where there could be health concerns. While it might not be mandated by the government, automation systems may also be installed for reputational or image issues. Machine vision is all about quality control and precision inspection to make sure products are assembled and aligned properly, and that company brand and product aesthetic are maintained. Besides reputation, automation systems can also aid customer satisfaction, (for instance, by reducing scrap rates), so really it is again incumbent upon us as the supplier to help the end user justify our technology. And with the advent of technology becoming more powerful, more miniaturised, and more competitively priced, more businesses are now adopting it. IAA: How is Microscan positioning itself to leverage IIoT to its own advantage? What does the IIoT mean to Microscan when it comes to product development today? SS: To explain the company’s position and philosophy on the Internet of Things, we are highly invested as producers of, well, the ‘thing’. We see the camera or the barcode reader as the ‘thing’ that has intelligence, that is able to be connected, and as such it is imperative that we look at the IIoT with the concept of connectivity in mind. We manufacture our products in such a way that they can connect readily and easily across all modes of communication. This is to ensure that our products can transmit data to another system, like a PLC for instance, without compatibility obstacles. This facilitates the pervasiveness of data for widespread and variable use. Aside from this, we pack as much intelligence into our devices as possible, because it is the persistence of the ‘thing’ that is really at the crux of our role in IIoT — the irreplaceable device. What you see in factory automation today is the flattening of control architectures with a lot more intelligence being embedded in the lowest sensors in the factory floor so they can connect peer to peer without peripheral equipment. With
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FEATURE
MICROSCAN HOSTS 3-DAY ADVANCED MACHINE VISION TRAINING COURSE
W
ashington, US: Microscan will be organising a three-day training course on advanced machine vision tools taught through hands-on exercises using the company’s advanced Visionscape Machine Vision Software platform. The course will be held in the company’s headquarters in Renton, Washington, US, from January 19-21, 2016 at 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM daily. Attendance is free and online registration is available for all users; recommended for those with intermediate to advanced experience in machine vision or programming. While human inspectors on assembly lines visually inspect parts to judge the quality of workmanship, machine vision systems use cameras and image processing software to perform the same evaluations tirelessly and with greater precision. Machine vision inspection plays and important role in achieving 100 percent quality control in manufacturing, reducing costs, and ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction. Machine vision systems not only provide product tracking by way of barcodes and text to create traceable production histories, but can also guide products through automated operations, match products with labels and packaging, and compare product features to expected shapes, colors, fill levels, and sizes. Part of the company’s Certified Training program, this three-day machine vision training course aims to offer an in-depth study of its complete tool library available in its advanced Visionscape Machine Vision Software. Training will provide an overview of common machine vision applications with hands-on exercises to familiarise attendees with setting up inspection tools and programming jobs to solve a range of tasks from basic barcode reading and text recognition to complex measurements, defect detection, and guidance. Microscan machine vision technology experts will be available to offer one-on-one guidance on attendees’ specific applications and attendees are invited to bring their parts or barcodes to the event to discuss with the the company’s team. To register for this training course or request additional training, visit www.microscan.com/training.aspx
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
FEATURE
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
this architecture, you do not have to go through a labyrinth of devices or communication media to make decisions. Ultimately, this simplification of the factory network is what is going to drive IIoT. The ability to transmit data efficiently and quickly to other devices that needed to consume it to optimise any function of manufacturing processes — that is where we see our technologies playing a role. We aim to make our devices as intelligent as possible because these devices will persist. No matter what manufacturing scenario, businesses will always need sensors, like cameras and barcode readers, to acquire data from the factory floor to enable any process in the IIoT. IAA: How far has track and tracing come along and how has IIoT impacted its development? SS: When I first started my journey with the company, someone told me that it would not be long before you will be able to track and trace a product from manufacture to the end user with the use of a smart phone. I have not seen this yet, but with the rate at which connectivity technology is evolving, I believe that this scenario will be entirely possible sooner than later. Privacy issues are the main obstacle in the road to achieving this because of all the data collected from various parties along the way. However, I think that the ability to track a product directly to a household and advise the consumer about the quality of the product, should there be any concerns about it, is going to happen eventually. This would be the ultimate display of the capabilities of the IIoT — a scenario where I can use a smartphone to access information acquired from barcode readers at the various stages in the manufacturing supply chain. So it is only a matter of time before the technology that is able to tie all these data together, and present them at the touch of a finger, is available. IAA: Label Vision Systems (LVS) was recently acquired by Microscan. How does the LVS brand strengthen Microscan’s position in the machine vision market? SS: Traceability is critical when it comes to the health and the pharmaceutical sector. Making sure that the barcodes are of good quality so that they can be tracked throughout the supply chain is critical. Recently, we acquired a company called Label Vision Systems (LVS), which verifies barcodes to barcode quality standards like ISO, GS1, and others, to meet the traceability requirements of certain industries. This is getting back to government mandates
Verification is a critical element in traceability. Verification uses machine vision technology rather than barcode reading technology. and regulatory requirements — they are hitting the medical device and pharmaceutical industry more directly to ensure that there are unique barcodes or identifiers on every product, and that those codes have sufficient quality so they can be read downstream. Ensuring readability of codes means that they need to be graded. So with LVS, we now have a full range of technology intended specifically for grading barcodes and other identifiers to meet these customers’ needs. Verification is a critical element in traceability. Verification uses machine vision technology, rather than barcode reading technology, because you are not just reading a code but rather analysing its physical appearance as well as acquiring data for further code string format analysis. The synergy of LVS verification technology within the Microscan portfolio is compelling because Microscan was already providing verification, but this was primarily for direct part marks. By adding LVS products to our offerings, we expand our expertise from DPM verification to the verification of any barcode, printed or marked. LVS also allows us to expand our role in the manufacturing process into more areas of the supply chain. Take a medical device company as an example — LVS may be working with their packaging operations to make sure that the label on the outside of a box can be tracked. Meanwhile, we at Microscan are working with the same company ensuring traceability through the manufacturing operations of the product itself after it is packaged. With this acquisition, we can now offer all of these capabilities as a single solution, including the capability to do offline and inline verification through LVS products. Not only is our unified product line extremely synergistic, but LVS also addresses the same customers as us, so there is a lot of synergy from a market and customer standpoint as well.
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December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG Malaysia, Automation, Market
MALAYSIA’S AUTOMATION SECTOR
IN THIS ARTICLE, WE EXAMINE A SCREENING OF 198 AUTOMATION VENDORS IN THE COUNTRY, A SUBSET OF WHICH WAS SURVEYED IN-DEPTH ON THEIR VIEWS OF THEIR MARKET AND CONTRAST THESE WITH THE LATEST INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS, NAMELY THE MASSIVE SHIFT IN INVESTMENT GROWTH SECTORS. BY FABIAN TEJA BOEGERSHAUSEN, MANAGER, AND FREDERIK JUNGE, VISITING ANALYST, SOLIDIANCE
T
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ENQUIRY NUMBER
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he former core production sectors of Malaysia — Oil & Gas, Palm Oil, Electronics and Automotive — are facing world market plunge, rising cost and increased competition from the neighbouring markets, especially with the reduced trade barriers of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) coming into effect since 2015. Although investments were still up in 2014, they are massively changing their focus away from oil & gas, automotive and other former key sectors, and towards, for instance, chemicals and refinement of petroleum. Industrial automation vendors question about where the remaining opportunities are and which factors will affect a move in the market. Our survey shows that firms radically turn away from the once ‘land of milk and honey’ in the oil & gas as well as their ‘bread and butter’ business in manufacturing sectors, and instead see the future in processing industries such as chemicals and food processing. Firms also see a rising relevance of the aftersales business and believe that positive impulses could also come from the IT industry. Sector specific data partially confirms the future potential seen by vendors in their newly preferred areas, yet also leave a lot of questions open. At
this point, it is hard to predict how industrial investments and demands for automation will turn out in 2015 and beyond. What is clear is that there is not going to be a broad rebound of industrial growth across sectors, but vendors must pro-actively seek for the ‘pockets of opportunity’ and prepare to offer their products and services outside of their comfort zones. Economic And Investment Trends Malaysia is one of the most developed nations in ASEAN and has shown in the past a solid, industrial growth. It has developed essentially in four main industrial sectors: • • • •
Oil & gas — large reserve fields, mostly raw exports. Palm oil — large plantations, mostly raw exports. Electronics — the biggest technically manufactured export. Automotive — for the domestic market only.
In recent years, the technical manufacturing, both in electronics and automotive, has slowed down. Producers and vendors of automation goods
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
FEATURES
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In recent years, the technical manufacturing, both in electronics and automotive, has slowed down. Producers and vendors of automation goods and services must ask themselves which sectors in Malaysia can open future opportunities and still hold potential for growth.
and services must ask themselves which sectors in Malaysia can open future opportunities and still hold potential for growth at this point. There are some sectors which may hold this potential, especially one much discussed recently that is the chemicals and petrochemicals sector, which now overlaps with the petroleum/downstream industry. There is an evident shift in the Malaysian economy as downstream processing, petrochemicals, and chemicals, see an apparent surge in investments, while top sectors such as transport and oil & gas are falling in investments. The strong increase in downstream processing and petrochemicals are mainly due to super large projects such as the RAPID integrated refinery and petrochemicals project worth US$16 billion (invested over several years). Electricals and Electronics appear stable while other sectors form a mixed picture. A strong increase is also in the production of basic metals, such as foundry projects. Buildings and construction could not be recognised here due to unrepeated reporting of investments. Other manufacturing sectors in total amount to roughly US$4.3 billion worth of investments. Approved investments were ~US$74 billion in 2014. The main driver remains to be the service sector with almost ~ US$47 billion of investment. Notably, in 2014, the domestic investment had more impact to the economy, accounting for 72.6 percent, whilst the remaining 27.4 percent accounted for foreign investments. The investments recovered moderately fast after the economic crisis in 2008 and continued
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FEATURES to increase over the last years. Automation Vendor Survey Malaysia’s Automation Vendor Landscape The activities of automaton firms have been focused so far on some of the technical industrial sectors such as electronics and automotive, plus key processing industries. About 80 percent of Malaysian automation firms build their headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor region. Automation firms in non-central regions tend to be focused heavily on technical know-how and products suited for the local industries, eg: electronics in the north region The divide between firms giving a positive and negative outlook sentiment reflects the change of the automation landscape. Firms are either clearly positive — as they are betting on the right sectors — or negative as their industry focus cannot capture the current opportunities. Business Outlook Of Automation Vendors The aftersales market is becoming more significant to the vendors. Especially in partially decreasing markets, maintenance and service are important business areas. The availability of (local) engineering experts will be one of the main issues of the automation industry while cyber security and the access to spare parts may be an upcoming challenge as well. The New Priorities For Automation Vendors Solidiance screened over than 190 automation vendors with 10 in-depth interviews on their business outlook and future industrial priorities. Based on the survey, the vendors had radically turned away from some of the previous high profile sectors and bet on previous side-lines of the business plus keep a few sectors in a middlefield of preference. The industries were grouped into three clusters: 1. ‘New hopes’, as these sectors appear to have suddenly high expectations in them.
December/January 2015 | industrial automation asia
2. ‘Solid bets’, sectors that had performed well in the past and could be at least stable in coming years. 3. ‘Fallen from grace’, large sectors, once hailed motors of growth, seem to have lost their importance here. While future investments are hard to predict in these sectors, recent investment records seem to confirm that the new focus is on chemicals, while the decline in coming investments, for instance, in oil & gas, is evident shown by the low oil price. Process automation: Refers to the
automation of continuous ‘flowing’ processes for fluids, gases as in chemical processes, fermentation of beverages or air cooling, and so on. Production automation: Refers to the automation of discrete ‘step wise’ productions such as in loaves of bread baked, number of chips tested, bottles of beers filled, and so on. Product complexity: Refers to the variables that must be accounted for in the automation and hence increase the cost of automation. Risk reduction: Refers to reduction of risk for human life and product liability,
December/January 2015 | industrial automation asia
FEATURES
The vendors’ expectations are in line with the growth of investments, yet some sectors, such as F&B, are out of line.
effectively reducing company risk and cost of capital. Savings potential: Refers to lowered production cost ie: by reducing downtimes and labour, allowing faster amortisation of the investment. Conclusions And Outlook Broadly, the vendors’ expectations are in line with the growth of investments, yet some sectors, such as F&B, are out of line. Automation Vendor Priorities Vs. Investment Trends In 2014, certain sector investments showed significant faster growth than others. This is, to a large degree, in line with the new priorities of the automation vendors. This is at least likely for petroleum and petrochemicals due to the state driven ‘super’ projects that will continue. Also, the chemical sector has had a significant increase. For food processing, however, the data seems to contradict as investments here are falling. This can be explained, for instance, by either very new trends coming up just in 2015 or perceptions unrelated to the investment trend. The neutral-to-positive stance of the vendors on electronics make sense in light of the data as well, as investment growth here is stable. The automation vendor survey was not able to cover basic metals as a potential sector. While the super heavy processes of this industry only partially fall under classical manufacturing automation, this could indeed be an interesting field for future development. Sector Opportunities — Vendors’ priorities make sense on a broad level, but may need a reality check While the new priorities of vendors on chemicals
and petrochemicals against former top fields such as automotive and oil & gas make sense, their optimism needs to be validated. On food and beverage, the flaming political announcements are not backed by hard investment data and the fantastic investment surge in petroleum and petrochemicals is driven by a few large projects. Future Industrial Outlook — Trends are likely to continue in key sectors The government and joint-venture driven investments in processing industries are likely to continue at least for the next three to four years. In the classical sectors such as oil & gas, upstream recovery is likely due after two to three years when global economic conditions favour higher energy prices. The local transport industry will have to restructure if ever to recover. Export sectors such as electronics will likely be stable as innovation from regional headquarters plus growing global technology markets and stable domestic conditions will favor investments. How To Win In The Market — The factual market access will count more than ever in the automation industry The growth in chemicals as well as petroleum and petrochemicals are dominated by super projects. This means that few decision makers will steer massive project volumes. Some companies will emerge as winners while many others will miss out. Similarly, in small and not (yet) growing sectors like F&B, the access and presence in the underdeveloped market will decide who wins when the sector takes off.
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December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
ARTICLE TAG M2M, Remote Monitoring, Resource Management
REMOTE MONITORING HELPS INDUSTRY KEEP A CLOSER REIN ON RESOURCES AND COSTS
REMOTE MONITORING IS A VITAL ASSET IN CONTROLLING RESOURCES AND REDUCING COSTS. BY JUSTIN NELSON, M2M HEAD OF APAC, VODAFONE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
ENQUIRY NUMBER
8803 Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
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anufacturers have a fine line to tread keeping service levels up and costs down. They cannot let quality drop or risk facing compensation claims and reputational damage. On the other hand, product maintenance can be costly. Especially when it involves spending
money on deploying skilled engineers on frequent maintenance checks, or replacing expensive parts just for the sake of precaution. But if our machines could talk to us and send us a message, that would allow for efficient maintenance planning and ultimately greater peace of mind. The fact is they can. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) remote monitoring gives companies the ability to capture immediate and constant feedback on assets they are responsible for, helping them deliver better service quality and value while lowering servicing costs and machine downtime. More importantly, it can turn these assets into sources of constant real-time intelligence about customer behaviour, market patterns, and even major socioeconomic trends — all of which may translate into significant new revenue-generating opportunities. M2M can be used successfully across a whole host of business sectors. For example M2M means E-health specialists can not only make sure lifesaving medical devices are in optimal condition without having to make unnecessary patient visits, but also use individual and collective patient data to tailor care regimes and better understand chronic conditions. Meanwhile, municipal authorities can plan refuse management, cut down on wasted collection trips without the worry of overflowing bins, and tailor their sustainability strategies based on trends in urban zones’ waste outputs. M2M also means car manufacturers can transform vehicles into intelligent devices that identify potential maintenance issues before a fault affects the operation of the car — or even alert emergency services when Hector Landaeta, Maracaibo, Zulia, bv
Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
FEATURES
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
something goes wrong. These are just some of the ways where M2M technology has already helped to raise quality and reduce costs. But there are all sorts of future possibilities where remote intelligent monitoring can bring vast benefits to business. Remote Monitoring In Focus Many of Vodafone’s customers are pioneering innovative applications for M2M technology. A good example is in New Zealand, where the healthcare arm of Fisher and Paykel
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back fuel costs and CO2 emissions from unnecessary collection trips. Applying M2M To Your Industry How can you bring these same transformative benefits to your business? First of all, consider areas where maintenance demands sizable amounts of man-hours and capital expenditure. These areas may be ripe for M2M as a tool to enable proactive maintenance, where assets automatically relay their operational status rather than requiring regular
M2M can be used successfully across a whole host of business sectors, from automotive, to healthcare, and logistics. time-consuming physical checks. As data is transmitted in real-time, all the time, problems can be caught before they escalate and machines do not need to break before someone is sent to fix them. This means enhanced quality of service for the customer, and greater operational efficiency for the manufacturer. Not only does the customer have the reassurance that SG-1074-CF-Garantie 83x110_SG-1074-CF-Garantie 83x110 16.11.15 1 an engineer will visit at the first sign of trouble, but the
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ENQUIRY NO. 920
is using M2M to treat a condition that has long frustrated clinicians: sleep apnoea. Symptoms of this condition include a person experiencing unexpected pauses in breathing while they sleep. Fortunately, it can be treated by a number of devices. However, the majority of these treatments involve inserting a tube down the throat before sleeping, an uncomfortable process that leads many patients to abandon their treatment regimes. Fisher and Paykel’s M2Menabled sleep apnoea devices allow clinicians to track in real time how often patients actually use their devices, and whether they are using them correctly. The M2M data from these devices not only helps improve the effectiveness of individual patients’ treatments, but also promises to significantly enhance clinicians’ understanding of the condition and how to one day stem it at its cause. Electric car manufacturer, Mahindra REVA, based in India, is using M2M technology to better support its customers through remote diagnostics. By connecting the vehicles, owners can access various functions remotely through a mobile app or webpage, enabling them to check the status of a battery, control air-conditioning or receive SMS alerts should the vehicle be left unlocked. And Mahindra REVA’s service team can track maintenance issues and warn drivers when a repair or service is due. In Seoul, the streets are now cleaner thanks to Ecube Labs’ remote waste management. With local councils making cuts to refuse collections, the city suffered from residents dumping waste in public bins. To tackle this Ecube Labs developed a bin that contains a solar-powered compressor as well as M2M managed network connectivity, allowing the bins to hold four times as much waste, and the local council to remotely monitor when the bins are ready to be emptied. As a result the council has reduced its waste removal workload by 20 percent, as well as trimming
FEATURES
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
manufacturer is spared the expense of people, vans and spare stock wasted on unnecessary routine inspections. Second, identify areas where maintenance and downtime have a critical impact on the business’ ability to operate. In these areas, simply patching the issue — even on a proactive basis — can still leave the business open to potentially catastrophic outages if an alert or warning is missed by human error. M2M data, collected over a longer period of time, can help operators understand the root causes of potential asset failures and make systemic changes to their management. Once information transmitted over the network is collated and analysed, correlations can be made and fed into product development. For instance, a series of equipment failures, could in fact point to a fundamental flaw in a product. Or data from large scale deployments could reveal the optimal amount of oil to use in an engine relative to the typical operating temperature. These are insights that will not only lead to improved products, but enhanced business models. Finally, target areas where insights into customer behaviour can help price or tailor offerings more efficiently. By precisely tracking the performance and lifespan of a product, manufacturers are able to more accurately price the product, based on the output it will deliver. This could be the number of passengers a lift or escalator will transport, or in the case of an MRI machine, the number of scans in its lifetime. As the old business adage goes — what gets measured, gets managed. M2M makes measurement possible across an unprecedented variety of business aspects — and, by doing so, can inform everything from a business’ maintenance schedules to its overarching market strategy for the future. For lift manufacturer, KONE, being able to capture and analyse data means being able to provide more proactive maintenance. The Finland-based
Franco Giovanella, Jaraguá do Sul, SC, gi
Mike Gieson, san diego, ca, at
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operator is using M2M remote monitoring technology to send and receive operational data, such as the number of journeys a lift has taken, or reports from microprocessors monitoring key components. Comparing this data with historical logs provides insight into trends and potential issues, meaning KONE is able to plan maintenance more effectively and improve its service quality as a result. Looking Ahead The more insight manufacturers have into their products, the better they can maintain and service, price and improve them. The opportunities for operational efficiency and innovation make M2M technology an exciting proposition for business. Once machines and devices are connected and communicating the possibilities become endless.
EVENT REVIEW
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Singapore International Energy Week 2015
Augustine Quek attended, on behalf of IAA, the 2015 edition of Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW), where discussions on the latest energy trends and opportunitities took place. Singapore International Energy Week 2015 Date: October 26-30, 2015 Venue: Sands Expo and Convention Centre Country: Singapore
OPPORTUNITIES abound at the 8th annual Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW 2015), which saw more than 28,000 top energy leaders from 60 countries, sharing insights and perspectives on the theme ‘Global Energy Transitions’. Minister of Trade and Industry (Industry) S. Iswaran said at the opening plenary on Monday that the continuously evolving energy landscape presents opportunities and challenges. The fall in oil and gas prices have triggered a relook at upstream investments in energy infrastructure. One potential game changer is natural gas. Gas trading is expected to increase across regions, with most of the gas being exported to Asia. Bloomberg projects that by 2025 global Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export capacity may reach 500 million metric tonnes per annum (MPTA), 40 percent higher than projected demand. In the longer term, the growth of unconventional gas sources such as shale and the building of more LNG infrastructure will allow more countries to produce their own gas and make it available for export. At the same time, renewables are expected to make more headway due to environmental and climate Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
ENQUIRY NUMBER
8901
Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
The Singapore Energy Story Commemorating Singapore’s Golden Jubilee, the Singapore Energy Story Exhibition was officially opened by S. Iswaran, minisiter for Trade & Industry.
change concerns and technological advances. According to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s New Energy Outlook 2015 report, renewable energy technologies are increasingly gaining support due to continued cost reductions, and growing accessibility through new financing models. Renewables are expected to account for 60 percent of the 9,800 GW of new generation capacity installed from now till 2040. Energy Automation There are also opportunities for energy automation in Singapore. The minister mentioned that technological and business developments in advanced power generation, electricity imports and solar energy present energy options for Singapore. Given the high capital costs of power generation investments with commensurate payback periods, the Singapore government will release more information on the longer term
energy market outlook in Singapore. This could include information on the projected growth of electricity system demand, as well as an indicative mix of generation sources coming from gas plants, solar, and electricity imports by 2030. To optimise Singapore’s land use for future energy needs, the government will also seek feedback on a proposed land allocation framework for new power plants. Besides facilitating investments in the energy industry, the government will create modalities that allow energy users and businesses to adapt and respond flexibly to market developments. Two such developments are secondary gas market and further retail energy competition. The government will establish a secondary gas trading market in Singapore, where gas buyers and sellers can trade gas on a short-term basis domestically. It also aims to
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The event provided lots of opportunity for networking.
“The energy transformation will further drive technology innovation, mutual regional energy aid and international energy cooperation.” - Wang Min, executive VP, State Grid Corporation of China have full competition in the electricity retail market by the second half of 2018. Identifying Energy Threats However, while there are opportunities, threats were also present. While the fall in energy prices has been welcomed by consumers, it should not disguise the difficult road ahead for supply and energy security as upstream investment shrinks, said Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), in his keynote address on Monday. Other issues to consider in managing the world’s energy transition include the impact on future oil and natural gas production, renewables and climate change, he said. The fall in oil and gas prices already has had a significant impact on upstream investments, which is expected to drop by 20 percent this year from 2014, Birol said. In dollar terms, it will be the largest reduction
in history, with the investment cuts mainly coming from the US, Canada and Brazil. In the LNG space, it will be difficult for any projects not yet under construction to be on the market by 2020, he added. One positive development he noted was that concerns about energy security and sustainability will underpin growth in renewables. From 2014 to 2020, emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil will account for two-thirds of that growth, his presentation showed. The Singapore Energy Summit SIEW’s anchor event, the Singapore Energy Summit (SES), also showcased several in-depth discussion panels featuring energy thought-leaders across governments, industry and international organisations. They provided insights on Asia’s role in the energy landscape, as well as energy security and energy resilience.
At the second SES on Monday, Lady Barbara Judge, chairman emeritus of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, said that while much attention is given to renewable energy, nuclear power remains important because it addresses the key issues of energy security, energy dependence and climate change. “Nothing has changed after the Fukushima incident, except that the action [on nuclear energy] has moved to Asia,” said Ms Judge, referring to the Japanese nuclear power plant meltdowns caused by an earthquake
December December2015/January 2015/January2016 2016 | |industrial industrialautomation automationasia asia
and tsunami in 2011. Judge said that nuclear energy requires a great deal of public acceptance. Different kinds of nuclear projects were appropriate for different countries, she said, adding that new kinds of small-scale plants may be suitable for small countries such as Singapore. At the same session, Eric Luo, CEO of China’s Shunfeng International Clean Energy, said renewable energy is expected to grow with lower capital requirements and financing costs. “With capital costs reducing by about 10 times, solar energy does not need government subsidies and can be self-sustainable and compete with fossil fuels,” he said. The panelists also agreed that dependence on a single source of energy is not ideal for energy security. At the Asia Gas Market Workshop, Bernard Nee, assistant chief executive, Energy Market Authority (EMA) gave insights on the opportunities in the Asian gas markets. Since 2013, 23 new LNG import terminals have commenced operations, of which 18 are in Asia. 19 more terminals are currently under construction, adding a further 58 Mtpa of LNG import capacity. In Southeast Asia, gas consumption for power generation is expected to continue to increase in tandem with the construction of new gas pipelines and regasification capacity. The US will play an
emissions challenge the industry to make fundamental changes. Beyond investing in innovation, companies should also look for marginal improvements that can produce significant benefits, while standardisation in technical procedures and equipment across the industry could streamline operations and reduce component costs. He also commented that there are clear indications for strong growth in gas demand in China, with LNG accounting for only five percent of China’s fuel mix today, and mounting pressure for better air quality. At the IEA World Energy Outlook Special Report: Southeast Asia Energy Outlook 2015 on Tuesday, Loh Khum Yean, Chairman of EMA said that the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has set new 2025 aspirational targets to reduce energy intensity by 30 percent, and to increase the share of renewable energy in ASEAN’s energy mix to 23 percent. At the same session, Dr Fatih Birol said ASEAN will continue to be a major player in global energy markets until at least 2040, with coal playing a far bigger role than natural gas for power plants in the region. The IEA projects the region’s collective energy demand will rise 80 percent to more than 1,000 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2040.
EVENT EVENT REVIEW REVIEW is expected to comprise of subcritical technologies that are less efficient and generate more carbon emissions than supercritical and ultra-supercritical power plants, he said. “Investors will be happy about the projected high energy and electricity demand in the region, he said, but the rise in emissions and pollution, as well as sustainability, are areas of concern. To raise environmental ambitions, the IEA called on governments to embark on a ‘bridge scenario’ strategy to mitigate the rise in energy demand and emissions without harming economic growth. This scenario includes increasing energy efficiency in the industrial, construction and transport sectors, increasing investment in renewable energy technologies, reducing the use of the inefficient coal-fired power plants, and eventually impose a ban on their construction, while reducing methane emissions in upstream oil and gas production. These measures implies a high degree of automation in energy systems. In other sessions, panelists noted that ASEAN face a variety of challenges, including varying levels of development and infrastructure. “ASEAN is expected to grow more than five percent annually, and require substantial energy supplies to power this growth,” said Hiroshi Ozaki,
SIEW’s anchor event, the Singapore Energy Summit (SES), showcased several in-depth discussion panels featuring energy thought-leaders across governments, industry and international organisations. increasingly important role as both the largest natural gas market in the world and also one of the largest gas producers. Partner Event, Gastech 2015 At Gastech, a partner event of SIEW, Helge Lund, CEO of Britain’s BG Group, said that volatile gas markets and stronger calls for lower carbon
With coal being 70 percent cheaper than gas for each kilowatt hour of electricity generated, Dr Birol said: “coal will be the number one fuel in the energy mix in ASEAN countries” and that China and India’s coal policies will have an impact on the supply to Southeast Asia. By 2040, more than half of coal-fired generation capacity in Southeast Asia
chairman of Japan’s Osaka Gas. These energy supplies must be affordable, reliable and sustainable, said Kyle Peters, senior VP of operations at the World Bank. Energy efficiency should also be promoted, added Datuk Loo Took Gee, secretarygeneral of Malaysia’s Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water. Tang Kin Fei, group president
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power integration project between Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore is progressing well, exemplifying Asia’s potential for energy infrastructure investments. However, as fossil fuel reserves decline, clean energy’s share in the energy mix is expected to rise, the panelists said. The Singapore Energy Story Commemorating Singapore’s Golden Jubilee, the Singapore Energy Story Exhibition was officially opened by Mr S. Iswaran Minister for Trade & Industry (Industry). Commissioned by the EMA, the exhibition provided a glimpse into Singapore’s energy history, past milestones, and plans to ensure a sustainable energy future. The opening ceremony was attended by Singapore’s energy pioneers, the Union of Power & Gas Employees, heads of generation companies and students. After SIEW, the Singapore Energy Story Exhibition will be displayed at the Artrium@ MCI located at the Ministry of Communications & Information (MCI) until December 17, 2015.
and chief executive officer of Singapore’s Sembcorp Industries, said challenges include the high cost of infrastructure, the sustainability of the power generation business, the affordability of the power generated and the financial viability of clean energy. Ozaki noted that the diversity of ASEAN countries in terms of resource distribution and economic development also leads to political challenges. The panelists also concurred that Asia as a whole has vast scope for energy investments and interconnections, citing China’s efforts to strengthen its electricity grid and encourage the use of cleaner sources of power. Wang Min, executive VP at State Grid Corporation of China, said investments and breakthroughs in ultra-high voltage transmission have allowed efficient electricity transmission to load centres with little loss. China is working towards clean
energy making up 80 percent of its energy mix by 2050, said Mr Wang in another session. “This energy transformation will further drive technological innovation, mutual regional energy aid and international energy cooperation.” The ability to transmit electricity over long distances is environmentally beneficial by reducing the reliance on diesel-powered trains to transport coal to coastal regions for power generation, he told the Asian Energy Financial and Investment Conference. According to the IEA, more than US$1.6 trillion was invested in energy supply around the world in 2013, more than double the 2000 figure in real terms. “While this figure is expected to increase, there still remains a risk of shortfall in global energy investments,” said Soh Yap Choon, assistant chief executive of Singapore’s EMA. Viraphonh Vivavong, vice minister of energy and mines in Laos, said the
Youth@SIEW Adding their voices to SIEW, some 300 youths participated in Youth@ SIEW activities. The Youth Energy Showcase profiled 13 innovative energy projects such as an intelligent building energy management system, a battery rejuvenating charger and a stretchable generator to harvest wave energy. Students from secondary schools, junior colleges, Institute of Technical Education (ITEs) and universities took part in a lively Q&A session with Minister S Iswaran during ‘In Dialogue with Youth’. In a special message, Ban Kimoon, Secretary-General of the United Nations said SIEW’s theme ‘provides the opportunity to reflect on the major volatility in oil prices and the critical importance of alternative energy options’. Back In 2016 SIEW will return on October 24–28, 2016 at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
EVENT REVIEW
Yokogawa Users Conference 2015
The 2015 edition of Yokogawa’s Asia Pacific Users Conference took place from November 19-20, 2015, at the Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre. Many partners took part in this event, including Pepperl+Fuchs that has been in a partnership with Yokogawa for over 20 years. The relationship is based on a Framework Agreement which has led to development of many successful product solutions and governs most terms and conditions today. Yokogawa Users Conference 2015 Date: November 19-20, 2015 Venue: Suntec Singapore Country: Singapore
THE 2015 edition of Yokogawa’s Asia Pacific Users Conference took place from November 19-20, 2015, at the Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre. Many of the company’s partners took part in this event. The event had a total of 435 participants from across the globe, the majority coming from Singapore and wider Southeast Asia. As would be expected from Yokogawa customers, the majority came from the Chemical & Petrochemical (38 percent) sector, and the Oil & Gas (27 percent) sector. The Exhibitors The exhibitors and partners who took part in the event included, ARC Advisory Group, Badotherm Far East, Datumstruct (S), Dell, Eaton, Belden Singapore, Industrial Info. East Asia, NextNine , Pepperl+Fuchs, Phoenix Contact (SEA), Rittal, ASSchneider, R. STAHL, Vector InfoTech, Wago Electronic, Weidmüller, Wika Instrumentation and Yokogawa Engineering Asia, and well as some industry media outlets. Companies, such as Pepperl+Fuchs has been in a partnership with Yokogawa for over 20 years. The relationship is based on a Got a Question? Make An Enquiry.
ENQUIRY NUMBER
8902 Turn to page 72a to enquire or log on to: www.iaasiaonline.com
Yokogawa Management
Framework Agreement which has led to development of many successful product solutions and governs most terms and conditions today. For over a decade, Pepperl+Fuchs has supported Yokogawa user conferences and events that promote close interaction with customers. The company has a dedicated website for Yokogawa solutions which was developed to organise and support the company’s increasing number of joint process automation solutions. Exhibits As well as product and solution demonstrations by the company’s partners there were also solution demonstrations from Yokogawa in the areas of automation system, wireless instrumentation, field technology, CCTV, test & measurement and other
advanced solutions including energy management system, laboratory information management system, plant information management system and pipeline design & management system. A live plant demo system was setup which enabled the participants to gain hands-on experience. Some of the demo stories over the exhibition included: • DCS-SIS-PRM Integration • Benefits of Consolidated Alarm Management Software (CAMS) for HIS • Benefits of Exapilot • Benefits of Field Digital Technology • Benefits of High Performance HMI • Benefits of ISA100 • Next Generation Smart I/O (N-
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Mr. John Hewitt and Mr. Takashi Nishijima Conference Launch
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IO) for DCS (Non-IS and IS) Next Generation Smart I/O (NIO) for SIS (Non-IS and IS) System Independent Loop Check (SILC) [N-IO + FieldMate Validator] Showcasing Automation Design Suite to achieve Smart Engineering Collaboration Decision Support Solution (CDSS) Highly distributed wide area solution Showcasing New Stardom Controller
Co-Innovation Centre The company used the event to make a major announcement regarding the opening of the first co-innovation centre in Singapore in the first quarter of 2016. The key focus of the centre will be on the development of new new industry solutions with clients to boost next generation industrial automation process capabilities. Its establishment was fully supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), This is labelled by the company as the first centre of its kind to enhance industry collaboration, and involved a total investment of S$112 Million over the next few years. Its established was with the support of SIngapore’s
Economic Development Board (EDB). As the Japanese company celebrated its 100 years anniversary in 2015, a gala dinner was organised with performances in the evening, but on the business front the company launched its business plan ‘Transformation 2017’ to mark its centenary celebrations. The establishment of the co-innovation centre was set up as part of this plan. Companies are facing many challenges in today’s rapidly changing world. This was one of the driving factors in the establishment of this centre. Some of the key metrics companies aim to improve upon concern plant availability, reliability, safety, and operator effectiveness. The company made clear that the industry is grappling to find solutions to deal with rapidly changing technological and global business environment. The Co-innovation Centre plans to focus on strong collaboration & partnership with clients as well as established IT companies with the aim of developing customer-specific, cross-functional and intelligent solutions. These solutions aim to bring about wider adoption of remote monitoring technologies that help improve planning and predictability, thereby contributing to the reduction of maintenance costs and operation expenditures. It is intended that
this will improve the efficiencies in resource-scarce countries especially in critical Oil & Gas and Chemical industries and thereby greatly push for higher productivity. “Yokogawa’s first Co-innovation Centre exemplifies Yokogawa’s commitment in Research & Development. The Yokogawa Group will make certain its R&D investments remain relevant and consistent in developing innovative capabilities and technologies to provide greater efficiencies in our delivery of customer-focused solutions.” said John Hewitt, MD and president of Yokogawa Engineering Asia. Continuing, he said: “The Coinnovation Centre, being located in the heart of South East Asia, Singapore, sits in an advantageous geographical location with good infrastructure and connectivity to our valued clients within this region. The centre opens up new opportunities for Yokogawa to work closely with our clients to respond quickly to the needs of the global market situation, and to develop next-generation capabilities and technology to enhance the competitiveness of the industry automation industry.” Overview Whilst this is a biannual event, it has proven to be a success with high attendance numbers and many informative technical talks and demonstrations. The big announcement this year was undoubtedly the opening of Yokogawa’s Co-Innovation Centre, and of course the company’s centenary celebrations.
PRODUCTS & SERVICES
PRODUCT & SERVICES
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Allied Vision: Industrial Camera
EMG: Short-Circuit Indicator
A new Mako model within the ultra-compact, low priced camera family for easy integration into standard imaging processing systems is now available as a serial product. Allied Vision‘s Mako G-234 broadens the range of products equipped with Sony Pregius CMOS sensor technology. With its high sensitivity and image quality the Mako G-234 is a suitable candidate for the transition from CCD to CMOS technology. This camera combines a compact form factor with the advantages of Sony’s new IMX249 CMOS sensor. The camera enables high-quality imaging with frame rates up to 40 fps at full resolution (1936 x 1216) and offers the same image quality as higher-speed cameras equipped with an IMX174 sensor (eg: Manta G-235), but for a much lower price.
The short-circuit indicator type FLA3.1 is used in overhead line networks. The indicator can be mounted under live conditions with the help of an adapter and a hot stick. The FLA3.1 is completely self-sustained by the monitored network from a current flow of 20A upwards. The indication is done by six flashing LEDs for a clear nighttime visibility and three red display areas for a clear daytime visibility. The FLA3.1 can communicate with a remote control via a bidirectional wireless connection. In this way all settings of the indicator can be adjusted any time without removing the indicator from the powered line.
ENQUIRY NO. 8903
Bonfiglioli Riduttori: Frequency Inverter Bonfiglioli Riduttori has announced a new frequency inverter series, the ACU8 Cabinet Solution, which expands its drive portfolio. Specially designed to meet the customer requirements with a wide range of options, such as PLC functions and feedback sensors, ACU 8 Cabinet solution can be flexibly integrated into any automation process by using either standard control mode or bus communication protocols. The liquid cooled version does not require a large cooling fan, which makes the solution suitable for heavy industries with harsh environments in industries like mining, metals and paper. This 6 phase / 12 pulse compact drive brings benefits such as cost effectiveness and energy saving by reducing harmonics distortion.
ENQUIRY NO. 8905
ENQUIRY NO. 8904
Exxon Mobil: Synthetic Grease Malaysian manufacturer of pallet racking systems, YS Success suffered from low productivity and high paint consumption because of the lubricants used on the roller bearings of the oven conveyor system. High temperatures softened the grease, which resulted in bleeding from the bearings and contaminated the finished products. ExxonMobil engineers recommended the use of Mobiltemp SHC 460 Special, a high performance synthetic grease suitable for high-temperature applications to prevent grease softening and bleeding and reduce the formation of carbon deposits. The result — lower rejection rates of the finished product from 50 percent to less than 5 percent, and a 33 percent reduction in paint consumption, saving up to US$66,295 annually.
ENQUIRY NO. 8906
67
PRODUCT&SERVICES Faro: Laser Scanner Faro Technologies has announced the release of its Laser Scanner Focus3D X 30. The Focus3D X 30 completes the company’s X-series range of high-speed laser scanners. With a scanning range of 30 meters, the laser scanner is suitable for a wide range of scanning applications such as architecture, BIM, civil engineering, facility management, forensics and accident reconstruction. This product is designed to enable fast, straightforward and accurate measurements of interiors, such as small architectural façades, complex structures, production and supply facilities and accident sites.
ENQUIRY NO. 8907
December 2016/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
FCI: Power Connectors FCI has announced an expansion of their power connector family which now includes the PwrMAX Ortho power connectors. These power connectors are designed to support a new datacentre equipment trend known as Orthogonal system packaging architectures. This architecture can offer improved data transfer and improved system cooling by eliminating mid-plane circuit boards. These power connectors can be used with either busbars or circuit boards to distribute power in systems with orthogonal architectures. The connectors also feature the company’s new GCS plating, and supports current loads of up to 100 amps per contact. The connector is designed to be energy efficient, with a maximum contact resistance of just 0.3mOhms, and is rated to operate at up to 125 deg C.
ENQUIRY NO. 8908
Fluke Calibration: Multifunction Calibrator
Hradil Spezialkabel: CAN Bus Cable
Fluke Calibration has introduced the 50 MHz Wideband Option for the 5730A High-Performance Multifunction Calibrator. The option provides expanded wideband capabilities to self-maintaining laboratories by providing a method to calibrate the 50 MHz input of the 5790B AC Measurement Standard. This is accomplished by characterising the 5730A’s 50 MHz output using a precision Thermal Voltage Converter (TVC), as such reducing uncertainties to calibrate the 5790B. The 50 MHz option also allows laboratories to expand their wideband capabilities to allow for calibration of devices such as 50 MHz RF voltmeters. It features improved specifications that will helps increase Test Uncertainty Ratios (TURs) and increase test confidence while reducing the need to guardband.
Hradil Spezialkabel has developed a low-temperature resistant and reeling CAN bus line with a small outside diameter. The cable has been designed for minimal bending radius and high data throughput in particular. This makes it suitable for high-bay deep-freeze facilities, ie: for controlling stacker cranes with integrated video cameras. The CAN bus line permits the noise-free transmission of image data and control signals to the goods logistics department staticfree, even at low temperatures and under mechanical stress. This means that status data on the location of goods and sequences can be transmitted to the warehouse management system via image processing.
ENQUIRY NO. 8909
ENQUIRY NO. 8910
PRODUCTS & SERVICES
PRODUCT & SERVICES
December 2015/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Hypertherm: Plasma Cutting Electrodes Hypertherm has introduced the SilverPlus electrodes for its HySpeed HSD130 plasma cutting systems. Like all versions of the company’s SilverPlus electrode, this electrode is proven in its laboratory testing to last more than twice as long as a standard copper tipped electrode. In addition, the electrode delivers a very consistent range four and five cut quality throughout its life helping HySpeed plasma owners lower their operating cost and enjoy improved cut quality. The electrodes are created by fusing a solid silver tip onto a copper electrode base and then inserting a hafnium pin into the tip. This serves to dramatically slow the electrode’s wear rate as silver disperses heat better than copper.
ENQUIRY NO. 8911
Keysight: Type-C Test Fixtures Keysight Technologies has introduced the industry’s highest-signalintegrity Type-C test fixtures for highspeed differential bus probing. The company’s N7015A high-speed test fixture provides bestin-class performance up to 30 GHz of bandwidth, enabling engineers to verify and debug USB 3.1 Gen 2 designs and designs using other high-speed signal standards that support the Type-C connector. More demands are being made on PCs, tablets and other consumer electronics, creating the need for faster data transfer and higher power delivery. With high-speed data rate support, the ability to support multiple industry-standard high-speed protocols, and a power delivery infrastructure with up to 100 watts, the Type-C connector is set to be a key feature in many upcoming products.
ENQUIRY NO. 8913
IDEC: Relay IDEC Corporation has announced the FL1F SmartRelay, a substantial upgrade to their previous FL1E model. Responding to market demand for a programmable relay with many of the features found in micro PLCs, the FL1F SmartRelay can now accommodate small- to medium-sized OEM machine control and other applications. The FL1F SmartRelay CPU module has eight discrete inputs and four discrete outputs. There are six types of I/O expansion modules, and up to 12 I/O expansion modules can be added to the CPU, expanding the I/O capacity to 60 I/O. Maximum configurations are 24 discrete inputs, 20 discrete outputs, eight analogue inputs and eight analogue outputs. Each discrete output can switch up to 10 A.
ENQUIRY NO. 8912
Kinco: Servo Driver In order to make products easier to use, Kinco has updated CD/FD series servo driver. D2S/FD2S has an Easyuse mode that means it can diagnose the inertia automatically with an internal inertia algorithm. Meanwhile, it only needs a parameter (Stiffness) to finish parameters adjusting of velocity loop and position loop. It is qualified via Easyuse mode for most applications.
ENQUIRY NO. 8914
69
PRODUCT&SERVICES Kvaser: CAN Interfaces Swedish CAN hardware specialist Kvaser AB has announced two new additions to its Leaf CAN to USB interface family, the Leaf Pro HS v2 and Kvaser Leaf Pro HS v2 OBDII. This evolution of the Leaf family brings programmability to user’s fingertips, as well as CAN with Flexible Data-Rate (CAN FD). The company’s Leaf interface family is designed to provide reliable, low cost tools for connecting any CAN network to a PC or mobile computer in applications as wide ranging as automotive, mining, marine, military, oil and gas exploration, industrial and heavy machinery. The company’s Pro versions boast a high transmit capability that meets the needs of CAN FD frames.
ENQUIRY NO. 8915
Renishaw: Measurement System Renishaw has announced the launch of Revo-2, a new improved version of the multi-sensor 5-axis measuring head for use on Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs). Revo-2 and its new CMM controller UCC S5, build upon the Revo multi-sensor system with enhanced power and communications capability to carry the latest Revo sensors such as the RVP vision measurement probe and RSP3-6 extended reach scanning probe. The head also has an increased range of movement in the negative A-axis which can improve part access and reduce the complexity of stylus set-ups.
ENQUIRY NO. 8917
December 2016/January 2016 | industrial automation asia
Schneeberger: Universal 5-axis Tool Grinding Machine The universal 5-axis tool grinding machine for the production and regrinding of tools. Completely equipped for productive automated work: 7-station grinding wheel loader, integrated workpiece loader and optimal clamping systems for every workpiece. Equipped with the Zenon precision 3D probe for measuring the wheel shape and recording the tool geometry. Grinding spindle with 10 kW (13Hp) (S1) and a high torque for maximum stock removal rate. Robust and compact 5-axis kinematics for top grinding results. The easy accessible utility compartment facilitates monitoring and maintenance of the machine‘s hydraulic and pneumatics. The 5-axis CNC control Fanuc 31i B5 ensures fast and precise positioning of the machine‘s axes and is known for reliability and longevity worldwide. ENQUIRY NO. 8916
South: Surveying System Upgraded from the LCD screen of the former model, this receiver is installed with a more attractive one, 1.54’ OLED. Mode settings and status display are easily acknowledged from the screen, yet it features largely in high brightness and low power consumption, which is just tailored to the tough fieldwork. The compact unit is built to IP67 standard and protected from long time immersion to depth of 1m. It is suitable to work in extremely tough conditions like heavy rain, or even dropping into water for long time.
ENQUIRY NO. 8918
Calendar Of Events 2015/16 jan 27-29 Semicon Korea Coex Seoul, South Korea SEMI Email: jcho@semi.org Web: http://www.semiconkorea.org/
MAR 1-3 Propak Vietnam Saigon Exhibition & Convention Centre (SECC) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Singapore Exhibition Services Email: events@sesallworld.com Web: http://propakvietnam.com/
8-10 SIAF Guangzhou 2016 China Import and Export Fair Complex Guangzhou, China Guangzhou Guangya Messe Frankfurt Email: sps@china.messefrankfurt.com Web: http://www.spsinchina.com/
21-23 Power & Electricity World Asia 2016 Suntec International Convention & Exhibition Centre Singapore Terrapinn Email: yeelim.tan@terrapinn.com Web: http://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/powerelectricity-world-asia
APR 13-14 Power & Electricity World Asia 2016 Pullman Central Park Jarkata, Indonesia Terrapinn Email: enquiry.sg@terrapinn.com Web: http://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/powerelectricity-world-asia/index.stm
20-21 Cards & Payments Asia 2016 Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre Singapore Terrapinn Email: sunny.wilson@terrapinn.com Web: http://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/cards-asia/
26-28 Facilities Management Solutions Expo 2016 Sands Expo And Convention Centre Singapore Sphere Exhibits Pte Ltd Web: http://www.fmse.com.sg
26-28 Semicon (SEA) 2016 Spice Arena Penang, Malaysia Semi Email: semiconsingapore@semi.org Web: http://www.semiconsea.org/
MAY 25-28 Metaltech 2016 Putra World Trade Centre Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Singapore Manufacturing Federation Email: tzekhang@smfederation.org.sg Web: http://www.metaltech.com.my/
31-Jun 2 Biomalaysia 2016 Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Email: biomalaysia@myevents.com.my Web: http://biomalaysia.com.my/
JUNE 1-4 Asean Sustainable Energy Week BITEC, Bangkok Thailand UBM Asia (Thailand) Co. Ltd Email: asew-th@ubm.com Web: asew-expo.com
21-24 Automatica Germany Messe Munchen Trade Faircentre Messe Munchen Email: mmi_sg@mmiasia.com.sg web:http://www.automatica-munich.com/en/home
JUL 5-8 MTA Vietnam 2016 Saigon Exhibition & Convention Center (SECC) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Singapore Exhibition Services Email: william.lim@sesallworld.com Web: http://mtavietnam.com/
AUG 2-5 MTT Expo Indonesia 2016 JIExpo, Kemayoran Jakarta, Indonesia ECM International Email: info@mtt-indonesia.com Web: http://mtt-indonesia.com/
31-Sep 2 Medical Manufacturing Asia 2016 Marina Bay Sands Singapore Messe Duesseldorf Asia Email: mdafairs@singnet.com.sg Web: http://www.medmanufacturing-asia.com/
31-Sept 3 Taipei International Industrial Automation Exhibition 2016 Taipei World Trade Center Taipei, Taiwan Chan Chao International Email: automation@chanchao.com.tw Web: http://www.autotaiwan.com.tw/
SEPT 14-16 3W Expo Thailand Bangkok International Trade & Exhibition Centre Bangkok Thailand TechnoBiz Communications Email: enquiry@3w-expo.com Web: http://www.3w-expo.com/
14-16 Electric & Power Vietnam 2016 Saigon Exhibition & Convention Centre (SECC) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Hong Kong Exhibition Services Email: exhibit@hkesallworld.com Web: http://electricvietnam.com/
29-30 SCM Logistics World Asia 2016 Singapore Suntec Convention Centre Terrapinn
To be considered for inclusion in the Calendar of Events, send details of event (name, date, venue, organiser contact) to: The Editor IAA Eastern Trade Media Pte Ltd. 1100 Lower Delta Road, EPL Building, #02-05, Singapore 169206 Tel: (65) 6379 2888 Fax: (65) 6379 2805 Email: iaa@epl.com.sg We are moving! With effect from 15th January, 2016, IAA will be relocating to the new office. Please note that our mainline remains the same.
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ABB PTE LTD
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BELDEN SINGAPORE PTE LTD
35
887
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EXXON MOBIL
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919
FUJI ELECTRIC ASIA PACIFIC LTD
09
918
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55
925
IGUS SINGAPORE PTE LTD
59
920
05/07
921/923
NEWPORT OPTO-ELECTRONICS TECHNOLOGIES (S) PTE LTD
47
916
SCHUNK INTEC PTE LTD
01
861
SICK PTE LTD
13
926
SPHERE EXHIBITS PTE LTD (FMSE 2016)
21
922
ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES ASIA PACIFIC PTE LTD
IFC
917
CONTEC CO LTD
KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES SINGAPORE (SALES) PTE LTD
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Q1 2014
2015 2014 2013 2012
2011
Q2 2014
Month
Unique Visitors
Number of Visits
Page View
Month
Unique Visitors
Number of Visits
Page Views
14.1
2,140
8,139
46,399
14.4
2,545
8,860
44,435
14.2
2,010
6,353
37,637
14.5
2,520
9,204
48,589
14.3
2,582
9,827
44,460
14.6
2,307
8,377
41,042
Total
6,732
24,319
128,496
Total
7,372
26,441
134,066
Number of Visits
Page Views
Q2 2015
Q1 2015 Month
Unique Visitors
Number of Visits
Page View
Month
Unique Visitors
15.1
3,971
9,568
50,544
15.4
4,894
12,741
67,385
15.2
3,176
9,024
49,774
15.5
5,266
15,721
97,525
15.3
5,295
13,605
63,030
15.6
-
-
-
Total
12,442
32,197
168,348
Total
10,160
28,462
164,910
Increment
84.82%
32.39%
27.12%
Increment
37.82%
7.64%
22.46%
Upgrades
YES
Enquiries
78%
Following
Products
7
35K
Growth 400%
4
th
Articles
180
Responsive
YES
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