Houston — This year’s ISA Expo sought to solve some of manufacturing’s most pressing problems in security, safety, wireless networking, process automation, integration, and energy management.

The show, which wraps up today, hosted several co-located events, including the Microsoft Worldwide Manufacturing Operations Forum, the OpenO&M Executive Summit, and ARC Advisory Group’s Asset Lifecycle Management Knowledge Exchange and Technology Showcase, which spotlighted a number of vendors’ product announcements.

At an ARC press conference, analysts outlined future automation business trends that will spur new technology initiatives around smart grid systems, proactive plant asset management, including a focus on the transmission of power, mobile device management, and cyber-security. But it was the vendors with booths in the ARC pavilion that offered up new products to solve real-world problems today.

Among those announcements was a connectivity appliance from ILS Technology, LLC. The deviceWISE Device Gateway is an extension of ILS’ deviceWISE product, which focuses on securely and directly connecting factory floor devices, such as a PLC, to enterprise applications. The deviceWISE gateway appliance offers direct device-to-device interconnectivity, such as between heterogeneous PLCs, or other devices, including RFID readers and vision systems, the company said. It is protocol-agnostic, and no programming is required, said Jim Wert, ILS’ product line manager during a press conference. He described the appliance as providing “drop-in connectivity” on the factory floor. It is an alternative to an OPC-based communication server, Wert confirmed. ILS also supports the OPC-UA communication protocol.

In a separate announcement, Wert outlined a wireless version of the deviceWISE appliance that adds a WiFi connectivity extension and the ability to send device data from a PLC over a cellular network to a central database. Although a systems integrator is already using the product, it has not been formally rolled out for general release, the company said.

Also, engineering IT software provider AVEVA Group plc upgraded its product portfolio with AVEVA Instrumentation, a suite of applications for the design and maintenance of all plant instrumentation and control systems. It is built on the Microsoft .NET development platform that leverages Windows to display intuitive graphics rather than lists of specifications and parameters, the company said. In addition, the application incorporates all plant engineering and 3D design data within a single AVEVA database.

Meanwhile, Unified Control Technology Corp. announced a new generation of advanced process control (APC) technology that addresses a range of processes, including renewable energy production. Using value-based model predictive control (PV-MPC) technology, the controller is free of proportional, integral, and derivative (PID) tuning and model-dependent tuning. Networked for both hierarchical and distributed control for the entire production chain, the technology can also manage a complete cycle of control from start-up, to normal operations, to shutdown, the company said.

In other news at the show:

• exida, a supplier of safety, security, and alarm management services, tools, and certifications rolled out a holistic evaluation as a way to certify that an automation supplier’s technology is not only safe, but also secure and highly available. The exida Functional Integrity Certification is an independent third-party assessment that evaluates products against the international standard IEC 61508 to determine its safety integrity levels (SIL). It also checks security based on the ISA Security Compliance Institute (ISCI) Embedded Controller Security Assurance (ECSA) test specification, and ensures dependability of the automation product using modeling and probabilistic methods combined with empirical data.