The magazine cover is dedicated to Automa

The most evident demonstration of Automa's expansion is its transfer to new headquarters. Thanks to the use of EIB buses in the development of the lighting plant, the company may show the numerous Super-Flash potentialities in the Building Automation.

By the Editorial Team

Automa has been operating successfully in the industrial automation sector for more than 16 years. Well-known because of Super-Flash, the simple and reliable development system for creating HMI applications, in the last years the software house has been carrying out a deep transformation in order to answer adequately the new market requirements, such as the communication between different products, the convergence of technologies and the integration expertise requests.
The wide reorganization has permitted the company to grow in different fields, from activities to expertise, methodology and new partnerships.

Automa headquarters is in Gorle, a little town next to Bergamo

As a specialist in supervision, Automa has acquired expertise and ability to integrate successfully the various levels of industrial information systems. The software house offer is a wide and articulated one because it makes high reliable and easy-to-use products available to its customers, as well as, its expertise to develop numerous made-to-measure projects. At HMI-level, for example, Automa supplies qualified engineering software services permitting many companies to develop functional and high reliable applications besides Supervisione Libera product line, a complete range of products for developing easily supervision applications.
Automa is, moreover, present in the EPS area with services and projects for industrial production programming and coordination, as well as, with products such as MainteX, an application for programmed maintenance management, and Dolphin, a software created to make easier communication between HMI and EPS systems.
The deep transformation of Automa is also demonstrated in another evident aspect which is bound to internal organization, customer interfaces and to Automa's image: the transfer to bigger and more comfortable headquarters.
Urbani, the architect who followed the planning and building of each internal room of Automa's new headquarters, succeeded in reconciling all estate details with the technological and vanguard characteristics of a company as Automa, without forgetting the esthetic and the strong necessity to create a friendly and comfortable work environment.

In the technical area, programmers develop all Automa's software

With the technical lighting project developed by Process Impianti was, moreover, possible to achieve a double result in energy reduction and light quality with lighting values always calibrated to give a "warm" effect back to the work environment. Furthermore, the internal ways are safe also in case of emergency thanks to the presence of LEDS set on the floor that besides being a pleasant stepkeeper, express Automa's achievement in image and technology research.

Just on entering, you can find a warm and cosy atmosphere

The plant selection is remarkable and technologically advanced: Automa could not miss the complete network wiring with bus systems hidden under the floating floor to permit controls and modifications.
The strategic choice of using EIB buses to manage the lighting system has the double objective of reducing energy consumption and exploiting the solution as a live demo of Super-Flash development easiness in Building Automation.

Thanks to a Super-Flash application and EIB bus, the lighting system is managed through a PC

A plant of this kind gives an important advantadge as service for end-users because of its flexibility, easy to obtain by exploiting the basic characteristic of a bus system: the system configuration. In fact, in a bus system the functioning of a device does not depend on physical wiring but on how it is being configured, that is the programming of the functions linking control comands with devices 'to be cotrolled'.
Planning and developing a modern plant through traditional plant design and installation technologies is always possible even if it is, in the end, complex and expensive with a set of negative effectsin the control management.
In traditional plant design and installation technologies, the control signal is transmitted through power circuits (220V). Each control point presupposes a direct connection with their respective actuators to carry out their own operations. The more an electrical plant is rich in control commands and functions, the higher is the number of circuits necessary, and consequently the wiring complexity. Economically a complex wiring does not only affect the plant planning and development but also its evolution phase because of its maintenance costs. Furthermore, the quantity of cables necessary and their respective sections may involve slots of exceptional dimensions making practically impossible the development of those systems.

Meeting rooms layout

In particular, a possible expansion or functional modifications may affect a partial or total plant wiring. A failure research may cause, likewise, difficulties to carry out. In the case of Automa's new headquarters a system based on Super-Flash and EIB buses was set up in order to manage the lighting plant giving many advantadges compared to traditional wiring: lower manpower, lower building costs, reduced material quantity for use (cables, pipes, etc.), energy consumption reduction (thanks, for example, to light regulations with twilight sensors), higher and simpler maintenance, lower electrical shock risks for people, higher plant performance for end-users, reduced costs for modifications in progress and successive evolutions.