Attendees in the exhibit area at Schneider Electric Innovation Summit on Feb. 20 in Schaumburg, Ill., learned a variety of ways to understand and take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and other technical challenges. Source: Schneider Electric.
To help end users, clients and other process control professionals come to grips with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and take advantage of it, Schneider Electric staged its Innovation Summit: Industry for about 100 attendees on Feb. 20 in Schaumburg, Ill."With the IoT, if something can be connected, it will be. However, a bad day for information technology (IT) is no email, but for operations technology (OT) it's when a mission-critical application shuts down or there's a potential injury or loss of life," said Andy Bennett, senior VP of strategic customers and solutions at Schneider Electric. "Now, OT and IT are coming together, and their union can be powerful, but they need to join using principles that drive optimization and energy efficiency for users."
Bennett added that Schneider Electric's framework for accomplishing these goals is EcoStruxure solution, which serves four primary end markets, including buildings, data centers, industry and infrastructure, as well as six domain expertise areas, including building, power, IT, machines, plants and grids. The event included deeper examinations of how EcoStruxure is applied by users in food/beverage, water/wastewater, factory automation, robotics and other applications.
"EcoStruxure has end-to-end connectivity, and we're building software that can take advantage of all the data that its applications generate by finding patterns, solving problems before they happen, and maintaining equipment proactively," he explained.
Schneider Electric is also launching its Asset Performance Management as a Service (APMaaS) program and local service bureaus to help decision-makers with these efforts. APMaaS will provide users with overviews of their parameters, secure installation and monitoring of electrical assets, and advanced analytics.
Likewise, the event also highlighted EcoStruxure's Augmented Operator Advisor, which secures data from edge devices and HMIs, and delivers it back to users more quickly and easily for improved analysis. This can be done with regular and augmented reality (AR) interfaces.
