Creating a collaboration platform for better plant operations

Posted By Partha Srinivasan
Product Manager, Windows Embedded Server and SQL products

I’ve written before about how server appliances that are used in the industrial automation and manufacturing industries can improve productivity. Today, I have a real-life illustration of just how powerfully effective these systems can be.

Let me explain this with a real-time scenario based on the 800xA system from ABB, a collaboration platform that provides great overview of a plant’s operation. This is achieved by enabling collaboration between enterprise systems, plant systems, desktop applications and plant equipment. The platform improves operations, engineering, control and maintenance, enabling enterprises to do real-time decision making and improve energy efficiency, asset utilization and operational effectiveness.

Through a desktop and service-based architecture using the Windows Embedded Server platform, the solution combines multiple 800xA applications into servers with pre-tested, validated architectures.

The main role is the aspect service role that runs and stores the system itself. The connectivity service role provides access to controllers and other data sources, while application roles provide various kinds of extended functionality as well as collaboration with other systems. Typical application roles are batch management, simulation, optimization, video surveillance and maintenance.

The platform provides a functional building block approach for system design that meets every system application need. The system has a set of service roles that can be combined into one or more servers. Additional servers can be added to provide redundancy.

To read more about how intelligent systems can transform the enterprise, visit our manufacturing page; more about Windows Server for Embedded Systems is here; and read about the release of our newest platform, Windows Server 2012 R2 for Embedded Systems, here.