Kepware
Technologies has released KEPServerEX version 5.6 and has also added three new
products to its KEPServerEX communication platform, which have primary
relevance to both the manufacturing and oil & gas and industries. According
to the company:
- The Weatherford 8500 serial driver was developed as part of Kepware’s continuing effort to provide reliable and intuitive products to the oil & gas industry — it communicates with WellPilot rod pump controllers, which gather and monitor critical production information from oil and/or gas well sites.
- Connectivity to Weatherford 8500 allows operators to monitor information, alarms, and events from remote locations and provides operators the ability to make process adjustments.
- A Media Level Redundancy plug-in option has been added to address the critical operations that often occur in the industry and to provide an additional level of reliability over the company’s existing Redundancy Master product, which supplies OPC Clients with OPC Server redundancy
- Media Level Redundancy including Device Level and Communications Path Based Redundancy will be offered as a free plug-in for the next six months.
- The new MTConnect Driver (a royalty-free open standard for connecting shop floor technologies) allows connectivity to industry leading machine tools that support MTConnect or any legacy equipment through an MTConnect Agent — the 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 Simatic 505 Ethernet Driver.
- In all, 25 driver enhancements and over 75 KEPServerEX platform enhancements were made.