Manufacturing industry needs to build production systems that can meet the requirements of lower costs and quicker response to changing demands, said Yokogawa.

To aid this, Yokogawa has been striving to strengthen the link of its distributed control systems with production management systems and to network field connections.

The Stardom control system is a series of products that in combination form a network-based control system. This allows users to choose optimum components for an application from the provided components grouped by function, such as those for control, operations, or monitoring, and link them using network technologies.

Stardom allows decentralisation and autonomy of control functions, integration of data, messages, and events, and features a web-based human interface based on internet technologies.

"These days, the functionality required for an industrial control system varies greatly," director and executive vice president of the Industrial Automation Systems division of Yokogawa, Akira Nagashima said.

"It has become crucial to directly link the business operation to manufacturing, and enable seamless information communications with management information systems to produce a more efficient enterprise business operation.