By MatrikonOPC
Shanghai Petrochemical’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) needed to acquire data from the PLC systems of all of its main devices. Data had to be shared between a total of 51 PLC and DCS systems that came from different vendors and included various models. A proprietary data access solution was not feasible due to the complexity of the system; instead, the company needed…
By Jim Wiles, Software Toolbox
The Texas reputation for size comes with some mighty metrics to back it up. As the largest oil producer in the Union, the state’s wellheads are spread over 268,000 square miles. If you are in the oil and gas industry, on-site management and monitoring of land-based wells can be a logistical challenge as well as a considerable expense. The state boasts nearly one working oil or gas well for every square mile, each requiring stringent monitoring and reporting by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the governmental regulatory agency that oversees the state’s oil and gas industry.
Not surprisingly, automation technology continues to make a significant impact on the upstream and midstream oil and gas business, especially in the areas of remote…
By Melissa Topp, ICONICS
Over the past decade, software vendors have used Object-Oriented and Service-Oriented Architectures to design products that are both scalable and reliable. However, these successful architectural models only recently started to be used for the exchange of information in offshore oil and gas production.
More recently, the ability to collect and analyze exponentially growing sets of data is at an unprecedented level, due to the wide adoption of Big Data. At the same time, mobile devices are transforming the way…
By Owl Computing Technologies
As operations and critical infrastructure components become increasingly digitized, the threat to these structures moves from physical threats and attacks to cyber assaults. This means that your electronic perimeter is now as – if not more – important as the physical fence you have around your facility. But there’s a critical problem.
When you have a physical gate, fence, or barrier, your facility is isolated from the outside world. There are actual gatekeepers controlling the flow into and out of your plant, which impedes movement speed but nevertheless moves everything where it needs to be.
With a cyber system, this is…
By Inductive Automation
Enerchem International Inc. is a leader in the production and distribution of hydrocarbon drilling and fracturing fluids. Staying ahead of the curve with new technologies, Enerchem has been utilizing the SCADA software platform Ignition by Inductive Automation® at their Slave Lake facility in Alberta Canada for over 5 years.
Taking full advantage of Ignition and its built-in, cross-platform OPC-UA server, system integrator Kyle Chase – CEO of Kymera Systems – helped Enerchem build a cost-effective system that has increased the…