Over the years, you’ve amassed smart field devices through different area owners, different project owners, and even purchasing, and now you are backed into a tough spot; you have to extract the 'smarts' from these pricey devices acquired from different manufacturers, connected to different PLCs, and in some cases across different protocols. What to do?

The Campus Positioning of T-Systems and its components focus on combining different localization technologies like mobile cellular technology and complementary technologies like UWB, BLE, RFID, GPS, WiFi, etc. The connectors and APIs are all based on omlox, the first open and independent industry standard for localization services.

It is not surprising that automation control suppliers develop an ecosystem of solutions hoping to keep you returning to their platform for all their core and adjacent products. The message?  One vendor, one ecosystem, built, designed, and tested as one complete system. Sometimes this works, other times not. Should you employ one supplier? Or best-of-breed?

If you are designing your smart valves and smart transmitters, what communication mechanism do you plan to implement today or need to plan in the future? Jeff Besola, PI North America Board of Directors member, shares his perspective.

Condition monitoring and asset management applications require support for potentially remote sensors that need robust communication over a long distance. New SPE physical layer standards completed in the IEEE combined with PROFINET offer new connectivity solutions for communicating asset health insights for condition monitoring applications.