INDUSTRY VIEW

by Allen Avery, AutomationWorld.com

With increased data throughput and higher data resolutions, historians have also become a foundation for plant asset management initiatives, thanks to new visibility and trending tools. Today’s historians also support techniques, such as complex event processing, which can analyze multiple streams of plant data in real time to identify and diagnose emerging problems before they disrupt the production process in the plant, or negatively affect smart grid or other distributed assets.

Recent product advances increase historian data throughput, solution scalability, compatibility and connectivity with plant systems and third-party solutions. They also provide powerful visualization and analytical tools. These allow users to access and leverage huge volumes of plant data in near real time. Historians can collect and display real-time data and events, giving users a more comprehensive view of what is happening in a plant or distributed assets. Historian suppliers have worked to offer improved data access and visibility tools with their solutions. Many offer Web-based, thin-client access to historians, and most offer access to historian data via mobile devices. Powerful trending and graphics tools allow users to generate custom reports and charts to visualize plant data. Report

by Adrian Bridgwater, ZDNet UK

Business transaction-related electronic information flow has spiraled to new heights. Companies operate on the aggregated results of millions of ‘events’ and the prevalence of web services has served to further swell the volumes of data that must be extrapolated, interpreted and processed at any one time.

Who has profited from this reality? Well, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and complex event processing firms haven’t done too badly I suppose. ….

Logically, of course I’ve just read a story about this, so here it is: ERP vendor Infor is partnering with Microsoft to produce a new service called Infor ION to augment its SOA connectivity and data sharing capabilities and support web services. The ION Document Exchange offering exchanges “complete” electronic business documents that include all data associated with a particular business event. … more

by Rowena Mason, Telegraph.co.uk

It’s probably not uncommon for City traders to wonder how they burnt so much cash during a drunken night on the town.

By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up.  Telegraph article

John Bates comments:

One powerful way to prevent this kind of accident or fraud is through the use of stringent pre-trade risk controls. The benefits of being able to pro-actively monitor trades include catching “fat fingered” errors, preventing trading limits from being breached, and even warning brokers and regulators of potential fraud – all of which cost brokers, traders and regulators money. PVM is a good example of this.

Ultra-low-latency pre-trade risk management can be achieved by brokers without compromising speed of access.  One solution is a low latency “risk firewall” utilizing complex event processing as its core, which can be benchmarked in the low microseconds.  Errors can be caught in real-time, before they can reach the exchange. Heaving that drunken trader right overboard, and his trades into the bin.  Bates blog

From: ICT Results (http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults)

It’s good to talk, and new ‘intelligent traffic’ technology developed by European researchers should make traffic a whole lot chattier. It is all part of the much larger vision to create cooperative vehicle infrastructure systems that communicate with all the elements making up the road system: vehicles communicating with each other and with road signs and central services, and drivers who don’t know each other talking about their route.

Moreover, they do so cooperatively and proactively. Cars and infrastructure constantly monitor their surroundings and will warn nearby or approaching vehicles of a patch of black ice, a vulnerable road-user, or an emergency braking manoeuvre, all with the aim of making roads safer, more efficient and easier to use.

It is like an ‘automobile internet’ and, like the internet, it requires dozens of enabling technologies, from telecoms hardware to data transport software, protocols and application programs.

“Where possible, of course,” explains Paul Kompfner, Head of Sector Cooperative Mobility at ERTICO – ITS Europe, and coordinator of the CVIS project, “we have built upon existing technology and standards.” Report

BBC News

Shortcomings of the traditional web search methods are becoming apparent as the online audience swells.  That ask-and-you-will-receive mechanism breaks down when too many people want data from a server at the same time. Everyone knows the frustration of websites that will not respond because they are overwhelmed.

A change is under way to help the web cope with this growth and help some parts of it cope better in a real-time age. The change comes in the form of software specifications known as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

Despite the complicated name, XMPP does a very simple thing. Whereas the web, via HTTP, asks for information on behalf of an individual, XMPP makes sure everyone is told.  If HTTP is a performance for one, XMPP is a stadium gig.

Lufthansa uses it,  Facebook is thinking about it,  Google’s started using it, …

“There’s a transition going on,” said Dr Giles Nelson.  “XMPP is about pushing the information out rather than waiting for the people to come and ask.”

“That’s going to become more and more important on the web generally,” he said. “The information sources you want, the data will be pushed to you and will become available immediately.”

Pontus Kristiansson, head of a behavioural marketing firm says  something like XMPP is going to be essential as we move from a web of pages to a web of people.

“When the web is all about what people are doing, what they are saying right now, then a different way of handling that data is required.  The way you declare you are interested in something is simply by behaving like you do,” he said.  “Instead of people having to report what they are doing to a page so others can see it, the information might be published via XMPP to all those who are interested.” … BBC article.

DCL: I’m wondering if a little CEP might help the guys building these protocols?

by Jonathan Amos,  BBC News

The mobile satellite services provider Iridium has ordered 81 spacecraft to upgrade its global network.

Thales Alenia Space of France will build the satellites – 66 to form the operational constellation, the remainder to act as spares.  The order makes the Iridium Next venture the biggest commercial space project in the world today.

The $2.1bn deal has largely been underwritten by the French export credit guarantee organisation, Coface.  The overall cost of the Iridium Next project is likely to be about $2.9bn, much of which the company expects to finance out of its own cash flow.

“We are very pleased with the completion of our comprehensive vendor selection process,” said Matt Desch, the chief executive officer of Iridium. “We have a great partner in Thales Alenia Space, a world leader in satellite systems, who has developed a sophisticated satellite constellation that will allow us to seamlessly transition to an even more powerful network in the future.”

Reynald Seznec, president and CEO of Thales Alenia Space, added: “We were selected for this contract following a long international competition that started back in 2007. Report

But see also ….

US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in what is thought to be the biggest incident of its kind to date.

The US commercial Iridium spacecraft hit a defunct Russian satellite at an altitude of about 800km (500 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said. The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for later this month is said to be low.  The impact produced a cloud of debris, which will be tracked into the future.  Since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, it is  estimated about 6,000 satellites have been put in orbit.

Satellite operators are all too aware that the chances of a collision are increasing. Report

DCL: Perhaps a little CEP to help the guidance and avoidance systems? Any of our vendors working on that?  Lots of events out there in space!

by  Aharon Etengoff, TGDaily.com

by Phillip F. Schewe,  Inside Science News Service

Smart grid is a phrase that refers to a number of things at the same time. It refers to the modernization of the electrical grid itself — the way electricity is transmitted over long distances and then brought to customers. It refers to things in the home, such as appliances that turn themselves off and on at certain hours in order to save energy. And it can refer to the effect electricity will have on other parts of the economy, such as transportation. …..

Here is a sampling of what home electricity might look like in the year 2020. Roof shingles made of light-sensitive materials make electricity to help power the home. Twenty percent or even more of electricity sent by the local utility will be from renewable sources, such as wind or solar power. Many homes will be equipped with “net metering,” which means that if you generate more electricity than you can use (from solar cells, say), it can be sent out and added to the general grid.

One of the main goals of an automated smart grid for the home is for appliances to know when to operate. For example, with a single small microchip a dishwasher will start up in the middle of the night, when the cost of electricity is much lower than in the late afternoon.  Report

See also CSIRO project.

DCL: These reports never mention the event processing that will be needed!

by Dian Schaffhauser,  Campus Technology

The Cyber Challenge has set as its national goal to identify and train an army of cybersecurity experts to help fill shortages in industry and government. Campuses like Cal Poly are helping to lead the charge.

Karen Evans understands the need for online security–and for people who really know how to implement it properly. Evans, who spent 28 years with the federal government in the Office of Management and Budget as administrator for e-government and IT and CIO for the Department of Energy, among other positions, was in charge of a project during the Clinton administration to bring Internet access to the Department of Justice. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno wanted to be able to send and receive e-mail in the department and to set up an agency Web site. In August 1996, on the weekend before it was supposed to be moved to a 24×7 data center, the site was hacked, and Reno’s picture was replaced with a picture of Hitler. This most infamous of hacking incidents (probably caused by a CGI vulnerability) was a “really good wake-up call for a lot of people,” Evans said, “including my management. It was instrumental in helping me think through how to manage an IT and online services  portfolio.”  Read the Sign up call.

by Rainer von Ammon, CITT, submission to European ICT research initiatives.

Ubiquitous COMPLEX EVENT PROCESSING is an Industry led initiative to exploit the opportunities of the science of CEP into the mainstream of computational practice across diverse fields of science, not just the aspect of computational modelling but the fundamental physical world phenomena exhibited.  Elucidation of this discovery will lead to new applications of CEP across the bio-ecological world, and all the artefacts of human involvement and management of this ecology, such as:  commerce, industry, government and Society.  It will be the ubiquitous applied technology for processing the dynamics of complexity in real world systems.  It involves: fundamental science;  elucidation of the computational meaning of ‘event‘;  development of technologies appropriate to the scale of domains of different event patterns;  their incorporation into modelling and execution platforms that are useful to their clients – scientific fields, society, the world ecology.  U-CEP-submission