Positioning standard wins major award.

Profibus & ProfiNet International (PI) have congratulated the industrial partners and specialists of the omlox initiative on winning the Hanover Fair’s Hermes Awards 2020. This outstanding achievement was the result of strong support from the initiative’s partnering companies and the extremely active dedication of everyone involved.

“Such achievements are only possible when many committed individuals actively work together to develop a cross-company standard for a new technology. By integrating omlox in our portfolio, we at PI not only want to offer an open platform for the advancement of omlox, but introduce it through our well-established, globally active organizational form in all regions and markets throughout the world,” explains Karsten Schneider, Chairman of Profibus Nutzerorganisation e.V. (PNO) and of PI.

The publication of the “Call for Experts” serves as the starting point for the activities in the five newly launched omlox working groups at PI: Use Cases, Hub, Core Zone, Marketing and Quality Test. The results of the omlox initiative and initial experiences in the pilot plants form the basis for this endeavor.

“Countless discussions with interested users have yielded a wealth of new ideas for use cases, which will set the pace for further development at omlox. We still have a long way to go. The potential is far from exhausted,” states Eberhard Wahl, TRUMPF Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH + Co. KG, head of the Use Cases working group for omlox at PI.

With the progressing digitalization of production in the last years, there has been a substantial rise in interest in an open standard for positioning technology for industrial use, since it allows vendor-neutral products and solutions to be made available for logistical tasks, making it possible for positional data to be shared and used in a much more flexible way.

Omlox is an open, vendor-neutral technology, offering manufacturers and users new possibilities for implementing production processes and products that are in line with the requirements of Industry 4.0. The fact that omlox won the Hermes Award is an incentive and motivation for PI to continue pursuing its Industrie 4.0 strategy.

• See also: The locating standard of the future (23/6/2020)

@ProfibusUK @TRUMPF_News @hannover_messe #PAuto #Industrie4

Workplace distancing and contact tracing technology!

Location Awareness technology helps manage workplace density, improve worker safety and ensure business continuity during global pandemic

Emerson has enhanced its Location Awareness (pdf) technology to include social density management and contact tracing to protect employee health and help essential industries safely continue operations during challenging times, such as the current coronavirus pandemic. Part of its Plantweb™ digital ecosystem, Emerson’s Location Awareness provides an easy-to-install, cost-effective and reliable solution in the most severe industrial environments for companies to better safeguard employee safety and help create new work processes and practices for operational continuity.

By utilising WirelessHART® networks, a secure standard adopted in tens of thousands of industrial plants worldwide, along with battery-powered anchors and rechargeable personnel location tags, Location Awareness provides relevant-time, safety-focused monitoring of personnel, enabling enhanced geofencing and monitoring, improved safety mustering and more effective safety alerts. It is estimated that the system can help address more than 70% of common personnel-recordable incidents. It can also be installed in just days, compared to weeks for existing systems, and costs less than half of traditional alternatives.

“Worker safety has always been paramount for our customers, but now more than ever, they need tools to help them manage employee exposure risks and navigate new regulatory requirements,” said Bob Karschnia, vice-president and general manager of pervasive sensing at Emerson’s Automation Solutions business. “The majority of our customers are part of the essential, critical infrastructure around the world, and the new Location Awareness social density and contact tracing features can help keep workers safe while maintaining vital operations during this global pandemic.”

The updated Location Awareness technology enables manufacturers to use the Plantweb Insight Location application to digitally design geofenced areas that limit the number of personnel in specific locations to promote social distancing. If the social density – the number of people in a given area – exceeds a predetermined threshold, an alert is sent to the operator. The technology also provides reports for contact tracing in the event an employee becomes ill, enabling employers to quickly identify and notify other employees who may have come in contact with the individual and to determine the physical environment areas requiring deep cleaning. Plantweb Insight data will help identify high-risk scenarios and determine preferred manufacturing workflows for enhanced safety.

In addition, Location Awareness can be used for safety mustering for drills and emergencies as well as safety alerts initiated by personnel involved with or observing dangerous situations. The advanced technology can also be used for creating known hazardous zones and contractor work zones using geofencing.

@Emerson_News @EMR_Automation #Pauto  #coróinvíreas #COVID19 #coronavirus

Finding moving objects on-site easily.

The locating standard of the future.

Any manufacturing site has an incredible amount of moving objects. They have orders, material, carriers, tools, people, transport-equipment, and so on. How can we create a digital representation of these at a reasonable cost and based on a standard, which will allow full interoperability and secure any investments?

omlox started exactly with this target.

What is needed for any location transparency or any location-based service? These four elements are crucial:

I) The identifier: The moveable object needs to be identified. It could be done for unique objects by image recognition. But, since different orders often look similar, we need an unambiguous identifier. II) The infrastructure: The information of the moveable object has to be transported, and the location reference needs to be attached. There are different ways to handle it today, such as RFID-Gates, BLE or UWB beacons or land-marks, and a Wi-Fi network for SLAM based AGVs. III) The XYZ merging (Geo-Referencing): Location-aware objects come with their own coordinate-system. But they have to interact with other location-aware objects. As a result, there can only be one definition of the coordinates in the smart-factory. Talking the same language is essential. IV) The applications: There are applications for location data: navigating, tracking, routing, analyzing, warning, and so on. This layer will bring the final value of the location service.

omlox: The Industry 4.0 Location-based Service

omlox is defining standards in the cyber-physical location world: It is defining the interfaces between I) and II) as well as between II) and III) and III) and IV). All in all, omlox is the definition of three interfaces:

1. The air-interface between I) and II) for a physical reference.
2. The API between II) and III) to include any location data.
3. The API between III) and IV) to add any application.

With omlox, users can customize their location solution in a vendor-independent manner. Any mobile omlox device (I) from any vendor can be located by any omlox infrastructure (II) from any vendor. Any omlox hub (III) from any vendor can include any omlox core zone or other any complementary location zones (II) from any vendor. And any location application (IV) fulfilling the omlox specification can be connected to any omlox hub.

In the end, the complete factory design will change with smart location-based services.

@ProfibusUK @TRUMPF_News #PAuto

Where are you?

Tech Advancement Expands Plantweb™ Digital Ecosystem, Creates Secure, Cost-Effective Way to Safeguard Industrial Manufacturing Workers

Location Awareness, is a new offering in Emerson's Plantweb™ digital ecosystem that advances industrial safety to protect employees at refineries, chemical plants and oil and gas platforms. By leveraging the secure industrial wireless infrastructure, this personnel location system offers industrial companies an enhanced option to protect their most important asset – workers.

Emerson’s Location Awareness technology could assist employees in more than 70 percent of common personnel-recordable incidents. Used for safety mustering and man-down events, Location Awareness gives managers a snapshot of employee locations through rechargeable wearable tags. In an emergency, when every second counts, managers can quickly account for employees’ locations in the plant or facility and act to ensure safety.

“Safety is one of Emerson’s core values, and this latest technology advancement will help us bring new levels of safety to manufacturing workers across the globe,” said Lal Karsanbhai, executive president of Emerson Automation Solutions. “We know that installation complexity has been a major roadblock to sites considering similar solutions. With its fast, simple installation, Location Awareness is making it easier than ever before to implement a best-in-class safety system to protect employees.”

With scalable features, Emerson’s Location Awareness is the first personnel safety technology powered by the WirelessHART° infrastructure, a secure standard adopted in tens of thousands of plants and facilities worldwide. It can be installed in just days, compared to weeks for existing systems, and costs less than half of traditional, existing alternatives.

The Location Awareness system combines a new software application in Emerson’s Plantweb Insight suite with gateways, access points, location anchors and personnel tags certified for hazardous conditions. The software includes: a safety-mustering feature that shows which employees have or have not checked in to their muster points during an emergency; man-down alerts that allow personnel in dangerous situations to initiate an alert for emergency response teams; and a geofencing feature that designates perimeters around areas and sends an alert if and when that perimeter is crossed.

@EMR_Automation  #PAuto #Safety #EMrex

Location sensing technology

No wires required for accurate 802.15.4 real time location systems

Dust Networks® is expanding the capabilities of its wireless sensor networking (WSN) technology to include location sensing. The company has married its pioneering work in standards-based time synchronized mesh networking with new time-of-flight ranging capabilities to deliver a new paradigm in location sensing, Time Synchronized Positioning Time-of-flight (TSPT). Using multi-channel time-of-flight ranging on IEEE 802.15.4 radios, TSPT networks can accurately pinpoint the position of a person or asset to within 1-3 meters indoors or outdoors, even in the harshest RF environments.

“The seamless addition of location sensing capabilities to ultra-low power wireless sensor networks fundamentally changes the economy of delivering asset and people-tracking applications,” said Brenda Glaze, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Dust Networks. “We are looking forward to partnering with the leading sensor and asset management solution providers to enable new services and products.”

Conventional real-time-location system (RTLS) technologies typically require a fixed wired infrastructure which can be very expensive to install. TSPT utilizes Dust’s field-proven time synchronized wireless mesh infrastructure which can run for many years on batteries or harvested energy, allowing infrastructure to be easily deployed with no disruption to buildings or their occupants. Key features of TSPT include:

• No wires: every mote can run on batteries or harvested energy. Installations are non-disruptive, and the technology can be readily used indoors and outdoors.
  
• No site survey: the self-forming 802.15.4E mesh infrastructure channel hops, and the mesh connectivity automatically adapts as the RF environment changes.
  
• No special deployment skills: the network forms automatically, and no field wireless expertise is needed.
  
• Location tags, attached to people or assets, also run on low-cost batteries for years.
  
• Sensor and control data is readily handled by the tags and network, allowing applications developers to easily combine information about where an object is with information about how the object is.

Dust Networks TSPT products will begin sampling in Q3 2010.