Can Help-Luckily at the same time all the above requirements are accumulating, a revolution is occurring in industrial computing. Standards-based open architecture systems are skyrocketing down in price and up in functionality, all at the same time. The pace of change is so fast that sometimes it seems like the single greatest factor deterring their widespread adoption within industry is the future shock experienced by the engineering and end-user community. The new technologies in industrial computing are here today, and they have reached the point where they can be adopted widely to address the critical environmental and safety problems we face. They can do this by allowing us to install more and better monitoring and control systems.
More monitoring can help to pinpoint before they ever get close to the hazardous operating range.
It can also stop plants from operating under conditions which lead to the emission of excessive pollutants. This should allow plants to install many of these, scattered throughout their operations wherever process or equipment operations can be measured in a way that will provide that extra margin of safety. These systems can be tied into existing data highways in many cases. Linked with today's low cost standard networks like ethernet, these monitoring stations can form a distributed system. This system can report back to operators to provide centralized monitoring or even be programmed to trigger shutdowns, Fault Tolerant systems now available at low cast While we are installing more, we must not forget that we also have to increase reliability and safety.