With the rapid growth of China’s smart manufacturing market in recent years, ARC Advisory Group receives many questions from our clients about this market, especially about the extent and impact of government subsidies.
Declining natural gas prices and environmental concerns mean we could witness increased competition between coal, fuel oil, and natural gas as the primary fuel choice for power generation. Although still more expensive than coal and oil, natural gas combustion creates less greenhouse gas emissions and emits less sulfur than either coal or fuel oil, so is generally considered to be more environmentally acceptable.
Companies operating in the oil & gas, energy and chemicals industries met in Calgary, Canada in June at the Operational Excellence in Energy, Chemicals, & Resources conference to discuss how they can realize operational excellence even in challenging times. The upstream oil & gas segment alone has seen CapEx reduced by over $700 billion in last three years.
The nascent, fast-paced world of industrial analytics is evolving quickly. General Electric (GE) entered the market two years ago with its Predix platform and has been keen to update the industry on how these solutions are developing. In June, GE welcomed more than 1,000 attendees to the company’s Minds + Machines event in Berlin, the European counter-part to its San Francisco-based main event. ARC analysts attended.
OPC UA is a vendor-independent communication protocol designed for industrial use. TSN (time-sensitive network) is a further development of the IEEE Ethernet standards. Together, they aim to offer the first truly vendor-independent real-time, deterministic Ethernet communication standard. As the technologies receive increasing media attention, experts in the automation arena are asking: Will OPC UA TSN supersede existing industrial Ethernet networks?
Attendee interest remained high during the second day of ARC Advisory Group's fifteenth India Forum for the process and discrete industries in Bangalore, India on July 7, 2017. ARC structured this forum, Industry in Transition: Realizing the Digital Enterprise, to provide end users, solution providers, and decision makers an opportunity to learn about the latest solutions for industry, network effectively, and get an overall view of the market and its requirements.