- Home
- Glossary
Reference
Industrial Automation Glossary
Plain one-sentence definitions of the terms used on Indian shop floors: MCC, PCC, iMCC, APFC, AMF, OEE, Andon, brownfield retrofit, edge gateway, OPC UA, Modbus, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, CRCA and IP ratings. Maintained by Ankai Automation, Pune.
Ankai Automation · industrial automation manufacturer · Pune, Maharashtra · founded 2019 · ISO 9001:2015 · GST 27JOEPK8042H1ZN
MCC (Motor Control Centre)
A Motor Control Centre is an assembly of compartments that distribute and protect power to the individual motors on a site, each feeder carrying its own starter and overload protection.
PCC (Power Control Centre)
A Power Control Centre is the main incoming power distribution panel for a facility, handling large busbar currents through air circuit breakers, metering and protection relays.
iMCC (Intelligent MCC)
An intelligent MCC uses communicating relays that report motor current, trip cause and fault history over PROFIBUS or Modbus, turning a distribution board into a source of maintenance data.
APFC (Automatic Power Factor Correction)
An APFC panel automatically switches capacitor banks to hold plant power factor near unity, reducing the reactive power penalty on an industrial electricity bill.
AMF (Auto Mains Failure)
An AMF panel detects a mains supply failure, starts the standby generator, transfers the load, and reverses the sequence once mains supply returns and stabilises.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)
OEE is the product of availability, performance and quality, expressed as a percentage. It states how much of the planned production time a machine spent making good parts at rated speed.
Andon board
An Andon board is a shop-floor display showing target against actual production in real time, reading directly from PLCs and sensors, and signalling visually when a line stops.
Brownfield retrofit
A brownfield retrofit connects existing working machinery to modern data systems instead of replacing it, typically by reading legacy signals and republishing them in a modern protocol.
Edge gateway
An edge gateway is a device installed at the machine that reads industrial signals, processes logic locally, and forwards standardised data upstream, so control decisions do not wait on a cloud round trip.
OPC UA
OPC UA is a platform-independent industrial communication standard that carries both data and its semantic description, so a consuming system learns what a value means and not only its numeric content.
Modbus RTU
Modbus RTU is a serial industrial protocol, usually run over RS485, that reads and writes numbered registers on connected devices. It is the most common protocol on older Indian plant equipment.
Modbus TCP
Modbus TCP carries the Modbus register model over Ethernet rather than a serial line, allowing higher speeds and multiple simultaneous client connections to the same device.
PROFIBUS
PROFIBUS is a serial fieldbus standard widely installed on European and Indian process plant, connecting controllers to distributed I/O and drives over a shielded two-wire bus.
PROFINET
PROFINET is the Ethernet-based successor to PROFIBUS, carrying industrial device communication over standard Ethernet hardware with deterministic timing.
MQTT
MQTT is a lightweight publish-and-subscribe messaging protocol widely used to carry machine data to cloud platforms, well suited to intermittent or low-bandwidth industrial connections.
CRCA sheet steel
CRCA is cold rolled close annealed sheet steel, the standard material for industrial control panel enclosures in India, normally finished with a multi-stage powder coating process for corrosion resistance.
IP rating
An IP rating states an enclosure's protection against solids and liquids as two digits: the first for dust ingress, the second for water. It governs enclosure choice on dusty or wash-down sites.
VFD (Variable Frequency Drive)
A variable frequency drive controls motor speed by varying the frequency of the supply, cutting energy consumption on pump and fan duty and providing controlled starting.
SCADA
SCADA is a supervisory control and data acquisition system: the software layer that visualises plant state, logs history and lets operators issue setpoint changes across many controllers.
Digit height
Digit height is the physical height of a numeral on an LED display board. It determines readable viewing distance, which is the governing specification when choosing a shop-floor production display.
Next step
Need one of these specified for your plant?
Ankai Automation builds the hardware behind most of these terms. Send the application and we will tell you what is realistic.