Embedded systems may harbor hidden glitches
By Terry Costlow and Alexander Wolfe
techweb.cmp.com
excerpts:
Sensory overload "This will be a far bigger issue on the plant floor than in a mainframe," said Bill Heermann, sales director at Tava Technologies, here. "In a mainframe, you've got software that's only looking at about five streams of data. On the plant floor, you've often got 10,000 electronic sensors, and in one fashion or another, each sensor is a data stream that has to be examined. One of those 10,000 sensors may begin feeding bad data to networked devices above them and bring down the whole network, shutting down the plant."
"Companies are looking at this in many different ways," Heermann said. "People in the nuclear power and pharmaceutical industries, whose decisions are guided by regulatory agencies, must take an extremely detailed look at each component, starting at the bottom and working their way up the hierarchy. Others see the year 2000 problem as a profit-draining issue, and they want to use any Band-Aid and bubble gum to get past it as easily as possible."
"We've seen a lot of vendors who say everything is compliant," Heermann warned. "One company tested a controller made by one of those companies, and when it failed, it caused 19 others linked to it to fail. A software package that was supposed to be compliant worked fine through tests that simulated switching from Dec. 31, 1999, to Jan. 1. It continued to work fine on Jan. 31, 32, 33 and 34." |
