As industries have evolved to embrace new processes, and more stringent safety, quality & environmental standards, the demands on monitoring and control systems have increased. Monitoring and control challenges will continue to get more complex, not simpler, over time.
Traditional SCADA and PLC-based control is optimised for relatively slow single-point analog and digital I/O, in the form of voltage/current electrical signals. However, advances in manufacturing and measurement technologies have opened up the monitoring and control space to alternative signals and data sources including:
- Digital images and video
- Acoustics
- High-speed accelerometers and similar
- Fibre Optic Sensors
- Point-clouds from 2D and 3D laser scanners
- Unstructured information and events from the IIoT
ICON Technologies has extensive experience integrating these alternative signals and data sources into more traditional DCS and SCADA environments.