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Software & Integration Resource Center

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The modern process plant can’t run without a successful program of software utilization and integration. As machines become more automated and sophisticated, their smooth integration becomes even more important. Programs need to speak to each other. Field instruments must communicate with the control room. Appropriate alarm notifications have to happen. Information must pass back and forth between all manner of programs and be accessible on all manner of devices. Software has to be secure. The Software and Integration Resource Center provides articles, white papers, news reports and product information about the latest technology to keep your industrial network humming—either wired or wirelessly.

Directory of Lost Companies
Identified in this new Appendix are more than 200 companies whose name, ownership, or product line has changed significantly over the period from 1990 to 2005. Find the company you're looking for here.

Drowning in Data, Starving for Information-2
McMillan and Weiner Tacked a Big Question, What Is Data Analytics?

Siemens Industry Packages Burner Management Systems
Siemens Releases TR84.00.05 - Guidance on the Identification of Safety Instrumented Functions in Burner Management Systems

Wireless Ethernet Webcast: Ready for Industrial Prime Time
ControlGlobal.com
Wireless can today lay claim to perhaps the fastest uptake of any "new" instrumentation technology in the industrial marketplace. Wireless Ethernet, broadly encompassing standard and proprietary variants of 802.11 and 802.15.4 wireless protocols, are being successfully deployed to solve a broad and growing range of industrial problems from process control to environmental monitoring.

Control's Editor-in-Chief Walt Boyes and the ARC Advisory Group's Harry Forbes explore the use of wireless Ethernet in industrial applications. They are joined by a panel of industry experts and they explore which standards are taking hold in which industries and what types of environments are best suited for which wireless options.

Look to Valves for More Uptime
Thirty to Fifty Percent of Downtime Is Attributable to Equipment Problems

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White Papers: In Depth Research

Growing a Green Corporation
Author: Schneider Electric
Posted: 03/18/2010
Meeting the next great disruptive challenge of the 21st century.

Since the Industrial Revolution our society has been driven by an increasing pace of change in business and technology. Every decade or two we have faced a new and disruptive event that challenges business and creates opportunities-the locomotive, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the television and the computer, to name a few.

But the greatest disruptive event of the next 20 years may come, not from a single invention, but from the world around us-that is, climate change.

How your business responds to the climate challenge can either differentiate you from the competition and launch new and successful products, or make you the focus of consumer backlash and eroding margins.

This paper will explore the environment as a disruptive force in business, examine the consequences of inaction, and propose the benefits of a proactive environmental policy. It will describe increasing levels of investment that a small company, an enterprise or an industry can make to address the challenge and develop a business case. The paper ends with a concrete roadmap to lead you from today's "business as usual" to a long-term sustainable approach to growing a Green corporation.

After reading this paper, business leaders in every industry will have an understanding of how the environment will impact their business, how to make changes to mitigate the negative impacts and how to explore business opportunities in this new and exciting sustainable world.

Making Permanent Savings Through Active Energy Efficiency
Author: Schneider Electric
Posted: 03/18/2010
This white paper argues strongly that meeting greenhouse gas emissions targets set within the Kyoto Protocol will fail unless Active Energy Efficiency becomes compulsory.

Active Energy Efficiency is defined as effecting permanent change through measurement, monitoring and control of energy usage. Passive energy efficiency is regarded as the installation of countermeasures against thermal losses, the use of low consumption equipment and so forth.

It is vital, but insufficient, to make use of energy saving equipment and devices such as low energy lighting. Without proper control, these measures often merely militate against energy losses rather than make a real reduction in energy consumed and in the way it is used.

Everything that consumes power - from direct electricity consumption through lighting, heating and most significantly electric motors, but also in HVAC control, boiler control and so forth - must be addressed actively if sustained gains are to be made. This includes changing the culture and mindsets of groups of individuals, resulting in behavioral shifts at work and at home, but clearly, this need is reduced by greater use of technical controls.

Video Analytics and Security
Author: Schneider Electric
Posted: 03/05/2010
Using video data to improve both safety and ROI.

Most companies are gathering trillions of bytes of data, day after day, at no small cost, and then doing very little with it. Worse still, the data often is not serving its primary function very cost-effectively.

The "culprit," so to speak, is video surveillance data, the information captured by the video cameras that are used throughout most modern facilities.

But the situation is changing rapidly, thanks to an application called Video Analytics. This white paper looks at the new software technology, and how it can be used to leverage video data for better security and business performance.

An Analysis of Whitelisting Security Solutions and Their Applicability in Control Systems
Author: Andrew Ginter, ISP, CIPS, CISSP, Chief Security Officer, Industrial Defender, Inc.
Posted: 02/26/2010
Whitelisting is described by its advocates as "the next great thing" that will displace anti-virus technologies as the host intrusion prevention technology of choice. Anti-virus has a checkered history in operations networks and control systems – many people have horror stories of how they installed anti-virus and so impaired their test system that they simply couldn't trust deploying it in production.

While anti-virus systems detect "bad" files that match signatures of known malware, whitelisting technologies identify "good" executables on a host and refuse to execute unauthorized or modified executables, presumably because such executables may contain malware. This is a least privilege approach of denying everything that is not specifically approved.

In this paper the Industrial Defender team performs an independent analysis of a variety of whitelisting solutions for their applicability to control systems. The paper closes with some recommendations related to this technology and areas for further research.

Lear more about Industrial Defender

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