Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining the ground in all sectors of life; from homes to factories, from traffic control to environmental and habitat monitoring. Monitoring seems to be the key word. Wireless systems can take control actions, too and in this way they compete e.g. with existing process automation systems or with conventional home automation. WSN consist of nodes. A node in the...

The radio-based wireless data communication has made the realization of new technical solutions possible in many fields of the automation technology (AT). For about ten years, a constant disproportionate growth of wireless technologies can be observed in the automation technology. However, it shows that especially for the AT, conventional technologies of office automation are unsuitable and/or ...

The Aspect Integrator Platform (AIP) from ABB was designed to build the next generation of industrial automation applications. This platform is part of a set of products that provide the means to model, control and supervise continuous or discrete processes in various market domains, ranging from chemical and metal to paper and consumer industries. Each product works at a different level in the...

With the development of industrial automation technology, the limitation of traditional cable control network has become increasingly prominent. Consequently, establishing a reliable data transmission network becomes a critical demand in industry. Increasingly, companies developing monitoring and control applications in industrial and commercial building environments are looking to wireless tec...

Within the industrial domain including manufacturing a lot of various data is produced. For exploiting the data for lower level control as well as for the upper levels such as MES systems or virtual enterprises, the traditional business intelligence methods are becoming insufficient. At the same time, especially within internet companies, the Big Data paradigm is getting higher popularity due t...

Service-oriented architectures based on web services have become the de facto standard for the design and implementation of distributed applications. Due to their standardization, web services are widely adopted for inter-organizational communication, but their use for intra-organizational communication is challenging, especially within enterprises of the manufacturing domain. Business processe...

A CCORDING to many undisputable evidences, the complexity and importance of software in industrial automation systems is growing with a tremendous rate, making software engineering one of the major activities of automation systems developers. In general, software engineering is an established discipline with its methods, traditions and curriculum. Most of its methods and tools are applicable ac...

Software development is a complex task and therefore requires professional programming skills. Restricting the focus to a specific problem domain allows the application of domain-specific concepts and techniques that enable domain experts to develop software without being professional programmers. This paper describes such an approach in the area of industrial automation, where a new domain-spe...

Chemical engineering unit operation labs do an excellent job of integrating the whole curriculum and exposing students to pilot-scale systems. Where they are often lacking, though, is the exposure to and use of real-life industrial automation by the future graduates. A unit operation lab that has been automated using industrial level paradigms and equipment is the focus of this paper. A partner...

SCADA is the acronym for "Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition." SCADA systems are widely used in industry for supervisory control and data acquisition of industrial processes. Conventional SCADA systems use PC, notebook, thin client, and PDA as a client. In this paper, a Java-enabled mobile phone has been used as a client in a sample SCADA application in order to display and supervise the ...