Industrial
world
The
Industrial Application Server is an infrastructure for simplifying
the development...........
Application
of innovative technology in large scale manufacturing process
has been one of the major elements whenever the topic of reducing
cost in terms of operation as well as overheads is discussed.
During the last decade, developing and designing a typical automation
software application was relatively simple in terms of a concept.
Today, it has become more complex in terms of integration with
various processes as well as real-time reports.
It has become more complex in terms of complete software architecture
and its operating platform.
In the past, there have been many classes of servers that provided“services”
for industrial deployment, but they were usually limited to singular
functionality.
There were so-called “tag” servers that collected data
from plant floor devices, scaled it, checked for alarms and events,
and then distributed it to client applications.
There were communication servers, which simply managed the communication
between industrial applications and distrib-uted plant floor equipment.
There were calculation engines that processed data on-the-fly
as a production process was running, for re-use elsewhere within
the ongoing process.
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and dedicated process controllers
ran equipment or processes on loops.
Plant floor sensors, actuators and recorder devices were interfaced
to these control platforms.
Human Machine Interface (HMI) software provided the PC-based visualisation
needed to interact with the process under control.
The problem was that as engineers built more functionality and
sophistication into their applications, they were adding more
data tags, a lot more scripting and many more alarms.
In addition, to scaling systems up, to expand or enhance production
lines, meant that they had to add more PCs, PLCs and control devices.
This meant networks needed to grow as well, and they were usually
segmented so tht throughput would not be impacted.
While system engineers borrowed heavily from the client/server
technology deployed in the business world, they could not really
use it efficiently because of the differenc in the nature of the
business and industrial worlds.
As applications grew bigger and more complex, new problems were
created for administering networks, managing application changes,
scaling applications to add new lines, or to enhance application
functionality and efficiency.
Change management has become an increasingly large cost element
in re-engineering.
The only realistic solution today is to borrow a page from the
business IT world and deploy application servers.
As a mater of the typical historical development pattern, the
industrial world has lagged the enterprise world by several years
in its adoption of IT technologies and adaptation of them to the
factory floor.
This has meant that application servers were most often used for
business applications, serving up application modules and database
information for use in customer resource management, ebusiness,
financials, human resources and other enterprise applications.
The problem is that most application servers provide services
in a transaction-based environment.
And that does not work in an event-driven industrial environment
because the ground rules are different in a factory than they
are in an office.....
..contd.
