New automation company launched

Aware Technology has been formed to deliver the next step in the evolution of HMI/SCADA, distributed control systems (DCS) and historians. Based in Portland, Maine, the company says that it will deliver an automated learning solution that builds a knowledge base of process experience, to deliver both operational confidence metrics and anomaly detection. The company’s product, Process Data Monitor (PDM), will integrate with all existing HMI/SCADA, DCS and historian solutions through both native interfaces and industry standards such as OPC. PDM will also integrate directly with automation components through a PDM Data Gateway. Gateway-collected data will be delivered to PDM running as an enterprise appliance, or to PDM running as a hosted “private cloud” application.

Target markets include: oil and gas production and refining; power generation and distribution; water purification; wastewater treatment; chemical manufacturing; metals manufacturing; mining; and building automation.

“This is not a grass roots startup,” commented Peter Millett, chairman and CTO of Aware Technology. “iSagacity, a services company I co-founded in 2004, initially pioneered this technology in 2006, licensing and improving upon NASA’s patents and offering it to our customers in the nuclear industry as a service. We’ve formed Aware Technology to improve the product and deliver it to the masses under the guidance of Roy Kok, our president and longtime automation industry veteran.”

“This product represents the natural next evolution of virtually all automation systems,” stated Roy Kok, president of Aware Technology. “It is widely known that 50 percent of automation engineers and operators are likely to retire over the next five to 10 years. This is a major loss of experience for the industry as a whole, and the focus will be on capturing experience into a database to offer guidance to new personnel, and give operators and engineers the tools to be proactive in process management rather than reactive to process alarms and failures. Other solutions focus on advanced process control through complicated modelling processes and can’t deliver confidence metrics. Our solution is quite unique and is designed for the majority of the market, even addressing applications that do not have control rooms today, like building and facilities management.”

For more information, visit www.awaretechnology.com.