Inductive Automation Blog

Travis, Kevin, and Kent are back for an all-new and evolved Build-a-Thon! This time, instead of keeping the glory all for themselves, Travis and Kevin will each be coaching a new competitor from two of the top integration companies in the Ignition community, Vertech and Flexware, to compete for the Build-a-Thon belt. Join us at this year’s jam-packed, live-streamed competition for bigger fun, bigger laughs, and bigger builds as the competitors build “next-gen” versions of an HMI and dashboard, using their own newly developed Ignition Exchange resource.

During this panel discussion, you'll hear the leaders of some of the Ignition community's most successful integration companies discuss new technologies and innovations that are evolving the industry. Ideas and terms like IIoT and the cloud once seemed foreign but are now increasingly commonplace within the industrial sphere. What new trends and innovations will prove to be more than just buzzwords, but actual mainstays key to a company’s future success? How are automation professionals responding to these technologies? Hear our expert integrator panel answer these and other questions as they discuss what actually adds value within the industry and what's just hype in this fascinating panel discussion.

A panel of longtime Ignition users and integrators discuss the challenges and successes of tackling Ignition deployments at an enterprise scale. Learn about how collaboration with other integrators can unlock opportunities to take on global projects. We will discuss what it's like to have three to four different companies working together to complete a project and how to make sure the customer's needs are always front and center.

Users crave a UI experience that is intuitive, efficient, memorable, and visually pleasing. Unfortunately, industrial automation projects can be 100% functional and still miss the mark because of poor design. Good UI standards improve user experience and function, reduce training time, and help ensure long-term use of the system. In this session, you'll hear specific UI strategies that you can use right now to improve your applications in Perspective. Slash the learning curve on beautiful interface design with straightforward tips from a developer's point of view.

Deploying new features, bug fixes, and updates is necessary for every production SCADA/MES installation and without an established deployment cycle, modifications to any system pose significant risk. In this session, you’ll see Git source control, Docker containerization, and DevOps methodologies that you can use to effectively develop and deploy projects with Ignition. Apply standard Dev/Test/Stage/Prod practices from the software industry to support multiple developers, reduce unplanned downtime, and realize a more efficient process for developing and deploying Ignition projects.

Project Scope

• More than 2,000 tags
• Historical logging on most tags
• Approx. 50 screens

Project Overview

Trimax Systems did this project for George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. This is the eighth-largest airport in the United States. At George Bush Intercontinental, 1.2 million gallons of jet fuel are pumped into planes every day.

The Ignition project controls the entire fuel farm at the airport. The project was designed to acquire highly accurate SCADA information from the fuel farm and provide an HMI that is operator friendly. This allows the operator to easily identify and correct any issues that arise on the fuel storage and delivery system.

Multiple problems existed on the project from the antiquated PLCs, the multimode fiber communications and an outdated HMI/SCADA system. Information was being lost, not stored in history, or not trended. Reports were external to the SCADA system, and the information was being put in manually.

The HMI/SCADA was not redundant; if communications were lost or the server failed, the fuel farm operator would be blind to any critical events and data loss because of the failure.

Trimax uses Ignition’s redundancy capabilities for the fuel farm HMI/SCADA system and redundant PLCs to ensure minimal downtime. Ignition allows the connection of not only the latest PLCs, but older ones as well.

Ignition was used for the ease with which devices can be connected and for its third-party capabilities. The airport uses Kepware for the OPC server and the connection between Kepware and Ignition has worked flawlessly.

Reports were designed to automatically input data and print the reports on a daily schedule. Using Ignition’s reporting capabilities, the manpower once used for manually inserting the data can now be used for more productive projects.

Designing global templates and scripts in Ignition allows Trimax the ability to use the templates and scripts on other projects as well as standardizing the overall appearance of our projects.

The cost of the complete Ignition system is less than other HMI/SCADA systems, giving Trimax a competitive edge over its competitors.

The fuel farm and fuel delivery system were improved in many ways. The replacement of multimode fiber with single mode, the replacement of outdated PLCs, the use of the Ignition redundant system, automated reporting, and no data loss allows the customer to operate much more efficiently.