Automate 2002, Australia's leading hi-tech manufacturing exhibition, is regarded as the meeting place for thousands of users from the manufacturing and process industries. These users come to Automate to discover the latest in manufacturing technology and equipment and to learn how they can use this technology to facilitate their needs. The show was held at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre from 15th to 17th October, 2002 inclusive, and attracted some 8,000 visitors.

Yokogawa was featured at the exhibition with a 6m x 6m custom-designed display stand, which was used to introduce Yokogawa's new Network-based Control System (NCS), STARDOM, to the Australian marketplace. So as to concentrate exposure to STARDOM alone for this important release, no other Yokogawa products were on display.

During the course of the three-day exhibition, almost 80 sales leads were received which Yokogawa Australia sales staff will immediately follow up. Many leads were from users previously unknown to Yokogawa, so an expansion to the Australian business base should ensue. STARDOM won the Best New Product award at the Automate exhibition, from a total of 18 entrants. The judges were impressed by the NCS concept, and by STARDOM's reliability, operability, scalability, and ease of use Stardom incorporates the latest information technologies, including Java and the World Wide Web, to provide an open system which can flexibly be configured to suit each user's intended eBusiness application.

Stardom utilises Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components wherever feasible, thus slashing the total costs of ownership of the total system. Stardom uses a standard web browser as the human interface, so that operation and monitoring can be achieved anytime and anywhere with a thin client as a COTS platform. Its control network can be any TCP/IP-based network such as ethernet, fibre distributed data interface (FDDI) or wireless satellite communication network, and a variety of communications protocols in the control layer can be combined within the system.

STARDOM is targeted at the indistinct area between PLC/HMI systems and distributed control systems, and is particularly suited to the manufacturing industry sector.