A practical overview of the path from field devices and PLCs to HMI/SCADA, edge gateways, MES, ERP, analytics and cloud systems.
Sensors, actuators, drives, instruments, remote I/O and PLC control.
HMI, SCADA, historian and local supervisory systems.
MES, production operations, quality, traceability and scheduling.
ERP, PLM, enterprise APIs, planning and business systems.
An edge gateway typically sits close to the plant network, receives data from PLCs or protocol adapters, normalizes it and forwards approved information upward. OPC UA is commonly used for structured industrial client/server exchange. MQTT is useful for decoupled publish/subscribe distribution, especially where many consumers need normalized data.