Industrial automation and digital transformation company, Rockwell Automation, has begun rolling out its cloud-enabled human-machine interface (HMI) platform, FactoryTalk Optix, throughout Australia and New Zealand.
According to the company, FactoryTalk Optix, enhances the capabilities of the FactoryTalk software suite, which is used globally to support advanced industrial applications, such as IoT, creating a robust ecosystem.
“FactoryTalk Optix enables users to design, test, and deploy applications directly from a web browser, allowing them to achieve new levels of collaboration, scalability, and interoperability in optimising automation and IoT systems,” said Anthony Wong, regional director, South Pacific, for Rockwell Automation.
One of the new software’s first showings in Australasia will take place at ROKLive September 5-7, 2023, on the Gold Coast, Queensland, an event which showcases the future of manufacturing by bringing together hundreds of operations, maintenance, engineering, and technology leaders to connect and learn about the industry’s latest innovations and solutions.
FactoryTalk Optix is one of the five core solutions in the FactoryTalk Design Hub, which the company says helps industrial organisations transform their automation design capabilities with a more simplified, productive way to work. FactoryTalk Remote Access along with FactoryTalk Optix allows users to access machines, controllers, or HMI from remotely with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that Rockwell says uses industry standards for cybersecurity. Remote access enables on-demand remote assistance, installation, programming, updates, troubleshooting, and maintenance of remote systems and applications.
The company claims the solution results in increased design productivity, faster time to market, and systems that cost less to build and maintain.
“I’m calling this release ‘Visualisation for Visionaries’, because FactoryTalk Optix unlocks unprecedented collaboration and innovation through cloud-based engineering workflows. The result is visually stunning, data-driven, scalable solutions with seamless connectivity, which are faster to create and easier to maintain, to better support our customer’s smart manufacturing efforts,” said Adrian Giecco director, software and control, Rockwell Automation Asia Pacific.
FactoryTalk Optix is designed to help improve processes and efficiency. Among its features and benefits are:
- Design options: Design and test projects in a modern object-oriented programming environment.
- Reduce design time with:
- Multi-user collaboration
- Simplified standardisation through libraries of reusable content, custom templates, and style sheets
- Responsive graphics, easy wizard-based workflows
- Improve Development and deployment flexibility: Create an application once and deploy it to any device.
- Reduce Risk: better manage changes to applications and libraries through cloud-based storage with version control.
- Drive Standardisation with Graphic options: Style graphics to support a global audience.
- Reduce costs.
- Pay-for-what-you-need runtime licensing model based on application features used.
- Scale hardware requirements based on application complexity.
- Extensible options: Achieve openness and interoperability through machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud communications enabled by Open Platform Communications (OPC), Unified Architecture (UA), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Internet of Things (IOT) native connectivity and an open C# interface.
- Standardise HMI platform regardless of controller selection. Connect with any controller or device with built-in third party drivers.
