MITSUBISHI Electric Automation has introduced a manufacturing solution which links industrial control hardware to popular IT systems from Microsoft, IBM, Sun, ILST, etc.
According to the company, the e-F@ctory’s enterprise connectivity solution is built to handle high levels of data processing and interaction.
As more information technology infrastructure find their way into the manufacturing space, increasing amounts of shop floor information is needed. e-F@ctory is said to be a way to gather and manage this information.
The solution has four components. iQ Automation unifies sequence, motion, process and computer-based control on a single platform, and adds computer numerical control (CNC) and robot control capabilities.
According to the company, the iQ Automation component has a dual bus backplane and multi-threaded architecture to handle thousands of data transactions per second.
iQ Works, the second component, is an integrated development environment for iQ Automation used to develop, configure and maintain complete systems.
CC-Link is an open networking technology for the industrial automation market. According to the developers, it has unlimited bandwidth and can be set up without having to write any program code.
The final component, Manufacturing Execution System Interface (MESIF) is the conduit for communications between shop floor controllers and enterprise IT level servers and mainframes.
According to Mitsubishi, this eliminates mid-level hardware and adds transparency to manufacturing processes.
Key contact:
Lori Bacharz
Lori.bacharz@meau.com