Transcript of The 5 Layer Model of Automation... The "Automation Stack"

question number one what's question number one what is the five layer model the five layer model great questions so you see iterations of this all over the place but essentially we actually call this the automation stack so the five layer model is a marketing term the actual automation stack is this cloud all the way up at the top okay this is a big data all that cool stuff algorithms machine learning at the bottom what we have is PLC hm a PLC HMI we have supervisory control and data acquisition we have manufacturing execution systems and we have ERP in the old days and actually some people still use this PLC and HMI are a separate layer at the bottom you have my equipment our factory floor our operations PLC acronym is going up PLC HMI programmable logic controller and human machine interface SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition mes is manufacturing execution system ERP is enterprise resource planning and this is cloud-based big data analytics algorithms what do we do at each of these layers so what are we doing in each of the layers at the PLC HMI layer we're doing automation and we're doing direct control at the SCADA layer the supervisory control and data acquisition layer we're collecting data we are doing real-time analysis this would be like current evaluation of our processes and we're doing supervisory functions so think of the SCADA layer as the supervisor in the plant or the MANET who's responsible in the plant floor the person responsible for the shift is interfacing with SCADA the other thing that SCADA is used for is control rooms so where I have distributed control somewhere out I've got multiple facilities and I may have a control room running our SCADA system to handle things like incoming alarms notifications dispatching that kind of stuff that's your SCADA layer PLC HMI is almost always reduced to the line right so when you look at the total structure here it's normally line production line SCADA is plant this mes is think of it as business unit ERP is the enterprise the company itself and cloud is everything this would be like all of our holdings you might share data with partners in the cloud level so that's PLC HMI SCADA mes ERP and cloud the typical systems integrator the OEM only operates here the OEM only ever is writing the PLC code and doing the HMI there are some OEMs that try to develop mes systems or SCADA systems for the equipment that they sell but the OEM almost exclusively deals in this layer the SCADA layer is the plant you'll have plant resources developing SCADA you'll have your integrator developing SCADA at the mes layer that's always the integrator I've never really seen in my career you know 20-plus years I've never seen a plant be able to develop its own mes system effectively at the ERP layer this is IT so we're gonna be talking about itno T the ERP layer is almost exclusively IT and accounting and the question mark is cloud who does the cloud stuff right now there are consultants who do cloud based analytics all the cloud base integrations systems integrators are doing cloud based integrations but this is the part that's in its infancy right here there are essentially two the cut in terms of the cutting edge component of what we do the two growth areas here are cloud and eye IOT all right and the the iio t-piece is the idea that this stack is seamlessly integrated right now everything is manually connected lots of engineering goes into taking data from here to here or from here to here or from here here okay