Industrial connectivity software for oil and gas, manufacturing

KepServerEx version 5.6 has new drivers and plug-in option designed for critical operations for the oil and gas industry as well as manufacturing.

September 13, 2011

Kepware Technologies’ KepServerEx version 5.6 adds three new products to its communication platform KepServerEx, useful to increase software connectivity in manufacturing and oil and gas and industries.

The Weatherford 8500 Serial Driver was developed to provide reliable and intuitive products to the oil and gas industry. It communicates with WellPilot Rod Pump Controllers, which gather and monitor production information from oil and/or gas well sites. KepServerEx’s connectivity to Weatherford 8500 allows operators to monitor information, alarms, and events from remote locations and provides operators the ability to make process adjustments.

As part of this introduction, Kepware added a Media Level Redundancy plug-in option to KepServerEx to address the critical operations that often occur in the oil and gas industry. Media Level Redundancy including Device Level and Communications Path Based Redundancy will be offered as a free plug-in for the next six months. This Redundancy will provide an additional level of reliability over Kepware’s existing RedundancyMaster product, which supplies OPC Clients with OPC Server redundancy.

KepServerEx’s new MTConnect Driver allows connectivity to industry leading machine tools that support MTConnect or any legacy equipment through an MTConnect Agent. MTConnect is a royalty-free open standard for connecting shop floor technologies that furthers the automation industry’s goal of seamless manufacturing operation. The MTConnect Driver allows the retrieval of machine-level statistics for productivity, OEE, and SPC analysis.

The KepServerEx 5.6 release also includes a new Applicom device model for the Modbus Ethernet Driver, a Ford Ethernet Protocol device model for the Torque Tool Driver, and several CTI device models for the Siemens Simatic 505 Ethernet Driver. In all, 25 driver enhancements and more than 75  platform enhancements were made.

www.kepware.com

Kepware Technologies

– Edited by Chris Vavra, Control Engineering, www.controleng.com