Rockwell Automation announces FactoryTalk Design Hub

Rockwell Automation has announced its latest FactoryTalk Design Hub, intended to provide automation design capabilities offering a more simplified, productive way to work powered by the cloud. The company says teams of all sizes, skill sets and locations can work smarter through enhanced collaboration, improved life cycle management and on-demand access to cloud-based software.

“In this new age of ‘work from anywhere’, having centralised, on-demand design tools is critical for businesses to scale production and easily adapt to evolving customer needs,” said Brian Shepherd, Senior Vice President, Software & Control at Rockwell. “FactoryTalk Design Hub gives manufacturing engineers access to the full breadth of Rockwell Automation tools and capabilities in a centralised nexus for successful design and collaboration across their team and the greater enterprise.”

Rockwell says that FactoryTalk Design Hub improves development and deployment of automation projects for industrial organisations, while adhering to the latest security standards and information technology (IT) best practices. It enables teams to access designs on demand from any web browser with software that is always up to date, and flexibly scales users and compute capacity to meet project workload demands.

“The digital transformation of automation design capabilities requires both the cloud to maximise control system developers’ productivity, and it also requires that all software tools are connected to each other by a digital thread to maximise collaboration, scalability and productivity,” said Craig Resnick, Vice President, ARC Advisory Group. “Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk Design Hub enables seamless digital thread connectivity between its design, visualisation, digital twin, storage and remote access software tools that provide control system developers with immediate on-demand access to all automation designs as needed regardless of their location, helping these companies to accelerate their initiatives ranging from digital transformation to IT/OT convergence.”

According to Rockwell, traditional software design approaches limit collaboration, scalability and productivity, while FactoryTalk Design Hub addresses these three primary concerns for automation workflow design.

FactoryTalk Design Hub includes five core solutions:

1. FactoryTalk Design Studio, a cloud-native software product built from the ground up to improve system design efficiency.
2. FactoryTalk Optix, a new addition to the Rockwell Automation visualisation range and the first cloud-enabled HMI product to be launched within FactoryTalk Design Hub.
3. FactoryTalk Twin Studio, an end-to-end automation design solution where users can design, program, simulate, emulate and virtually commission in one cloud environment.
4. FactoryTalk Vault, which provides secure, cloud-native centralised storage for manufacturing design teams, with version and access control.
5. FactoryTalk Remote Access, which enables secure connections to equipment, allowing teams to respond to needs faster and rapidly resolve production issues from anywhere.

FactoryTalk Design Hub and its core components will all be generally available by the beginning of 2023.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Michael Traitov