As PV power plants continue to increase, centralized management and information integration become thorny problems.Enterprise PV systems mainly supply power for their own needs and may sell excess power to the power company whereas Photovoltaic (PV) power plants specialize in solar energy collection and then feeding the energy into the grid.To transmit the data of the PV systems wired or wireless networks can be used. However, wireless networks have the advantage of flexibility and are the best choice for those who want quick deployment.Taking into account the requirements of wider coverage and long-distance transmission, the existing fiber-optic networks had many shortcomings ie high cost, complicated wiring and long construction period, and it may also have been necessary to excavate walls, drill holes, embed wires, or even destroy the original building structure. After evaluation, the Juli Group decided to adopt an easy installation and easy expansion wireless network system for early completion of this project.

At any given time, the textile company’s manufacturing facility has up to 2,000 textile carts in use. These carts are pushed from room to room, carrying materials or semi-finished products. Previously, a paper with a hand-written description was attached to each cart. This traditional method of processing made product tracking extremely difficult. Additionally, making sure that every cart of materials or semi-finished products went to its correct processing work station was also a problem. Therefore, the company desired an intelligent solution for tracking assets at their factories. They also wanted a solution that would help them collect process data so they could improve their manufacturing efficiency.

With a very broad range of applications, steel is an important material and has been developed into the most extensive alloy in the engineering world. Since delivering high quality is absolutely crucial for steel plants, ensuring maximum productivity and the best quality production are the keys to competitiveness in the steel industry. Additionally, working conditions in steel factories are not suitable for workers to stay in for long periods of time, so manufactures usually adopt various machines to complete the steel production processes. However, the precision of these machines is often overestimated and the lack of flexibility also makes supervisors unable to adjust operating procedures. A renowned steel factory in Asia planned to improve its Distributed Control System (DCS) of furnaces as well as addressing the problem of insufficient accuracy. However, most well-known international equipment suppliers can not provide a satisfactory solution and local maintenance because the project needed new technologies to more accurately control equipment operations. By implementing Advantech’s automated monitoring and control solution, steel factories can not only improve the manufacturing processes but can also allow users to add additional functions to the existing system so as to make sure the operation runs at high efficiency.

APAX-5045 modules provide excellent flexibility by offering both digital input and output channels. DI channels can accept 2-wiring inputs from a DC voltage source, to determine the state of limits, standard switches or proximity switches, and DO channels can generate discrete signal to external devices and change its output value to control the external devices.

APAX-5017 modules offer analog input channels for voltage and current signal measurement. Users can configure each channel with different input type and measurement range.

APAX-5620KW is a RISC-based Controller with an Intel XScale PXA270 CP. It also features two CAN bus interfaces, which support CANOpen stack (DS301 & 302), and two RS-485 ports allowing it to connect to remote I/O devices as well as being able to support up to 32 APAX I/O modules. The APAX-5620KW supports Microsoft Visual Studio, and .Net programming language, thereby allowing PC-based users to easily develop their own applications. It is also compatible with IEC-61131-3 based Multiprog KW languages, which allow users to download change functions and time deterministic support. With these great features, the APAX-5620 is an excellent cost-effective solution for a wide range of applications, such as steel production monitoring, spinning & weaving machinery, factory automation, and tunnels & freeways.

Advantech Webaccess, as the core of Advantech's IoT solution, provides users with a cross-platform, cross-browser data access experience and a user interface based on HTML5 technology. With Webaccess, users can build an information management platform and improve the effectiveness of vertical markets' development and management.Advantech WebAccess provides an HTML5 based Dashboard as the next generation of WebAccess HMI. System integrators can use Dashboard Editor to create the customized information page by using analysis charts and diagrams which are called widgets. After the dashboard screens have been created, end user can view the data by Dashboard Viewer with any browser for a seamless viewing experience across PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.

To fulfill the ever-changing specialized demands of various industrial applications, Advantech designed an intelligent self-management agent with software control functions and standalone hardware design: iManager, a built-in solution chip, is a perfect solution that provides a standardized API, integrating several unique platform consolidating functions needed by embedded system integrators to help improve consistency, lighten the development effort and speed-up a product’s time-to-market.

The flexible and expandable architecture of the WISE-PaaS platform allows for seamless integration between a diversity of cloud solutions and equipment by applying 150+ RESTful APIs, web services, and MQTT messaging protocol. These APIs allow the programmer to make function calls in order to access system features without worrying about the underlying source code or understanding how the internal hardware works. Customers can choose from a variety of solution-ready sets, simply purchase a standard set to create a completely unique object, or choose to combine standard and theme-based packages to fully customize an IoT solution that suits their individual requirements and working conditions.

Rockwell is a provider of industrial automation power, control and information solutions that helps manufacturers achieve a competitive advantage for their businesses. Rockwell operates in two segments: Architecture & Software, which deals in hardware, software and communication components of the organization, and Controls Products & Solutions that handles a portfolio of intelligent motor control and industrial control products, application expertise and project management capabilities.

Denso Wave Inc. is a leading company which provides best solutions in the business of Automatic Data Captures, Industrial Robots and Controllers.

Hitachi is a highly diversified company that operates eleven business segments: Information & Telecommunication Systems, Social Infrastructure, High Functional Materials & Components, Financial Services, Power Systems, Electronic Systems & Equipment, Automotive Systems, Railway & Urban Systems, Digital Media & Consumer Products, Construction Machinery and Other Components & Systems.Year founded: 1910Revenue: $94.0 billion (2014)TYO: 6501