OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems Co., Ltd. ("HIES") and Hitachi Industry & Control Solutions, Ltd. ("Hitachi Industry & Control Solutions") announced today that they have developed next-generation industrial controllers that achieve high performance and simple configuration with open technologies, to accommodate global rollout and the Internet of Things (IoT), which is the latest trend in the industrial world.

The middle range version of these next generation industrial controllers will be offered by HIES, and the high-end version by Hitachi Industry & Control Solutions. Sales are set to begin in stages from April 2016. The controllers will be marketed to a broad range of industries; most notably, the packing machinery, material handling equipment, machine tool, semiconductor/liquid crystal manufacturing equipment, and instrumentation fields.

In recent years, in the manufacturing industry, along with the globalization of the supply chain, there has been a demand for a revolution in production and services using IoT. In that backdrop, many companies are conducting activities in the field of automation systems, focusing mainly on Programmable Logic Controllers, which control various plant facility devices, and IPCs (industrial PCs), which are responsible for gathering data from facility devices and communicating with servers and other higher level information systems.

In addition to controlling facility devices, by seamlessly transmitting information on facility devices to the cloud and analyzing that information, these companies are striving to optimize entire plants and the supply chain as a whole.

In the past, however, because automation systems have been constructed by combining unique networks with PLCs running original programming languages that differ from one manufacturer to the next, it has been difficult to ensure affinity in communications with facility devices in the context of IoT, and to secure engineers with sufficient expertise for global rollout.

In order to respond to these issues, the Hitachi Group created a series of next-generation industrial controllers to accommodate IoT and global rollout. Following are the main characteristics of the recently developed industrial controllers.