Mug the bug!

Manufacturing Engineering, Jan 1999 by Hogarth, Sharon

No one is immune; Y2K is on the horizon!

Year 2000 is several months away, and the cacophony is deafening. The Y2K Bug infestation has grown large enough to be noticed by mass media, and realization of the embedded technology threat is finally dawning on the public. Many people are aware of the problem in a general sense. Some make dire predictions of the end of the world as we know it, while others casually shrug and dismiss the Y2K Bug as a hoax.

It stems partly from the practice of using two digits to represent a year, i.e. using 98 to represent 1998. When 2000 arrives, using 00 is risky-it can be misinterpreted as 1900, causing miscalculations, malfunctions, or simply causing the computer to freeze. "Y2K is a virus whose incubation period took 30 years," says Richard E. Morley, R. Morley Inc., best known as the father of the programmable controller, "and the same people who put the virus in are now being paid to take it out!"

"Us technical guys," Morley continues, " are wondering so, what's the problem? They say the computers will crash. So what's different about January 1? They crash all day long now. And we fix them, right? I mean we're used to it." Yet, he readily acknowledges his biggest concern is that people are panicking and running around like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling. Clearly, there are both technical and social issues involved.

While it's common knowledge that accounting and financial software is vulnerable, business software and computer systems merely represent the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a bigger potential threat and a much larger challenge-embedded technology. The scope of potential problems is mind-boggling. One pundit has dubbed it "The King Kong of Y2K."

A feature article in a recent issue of a prominent business publication looks at how industry is dealing with year 2000 problems and concludes that the manufacturing sector has the most to worry about. Embedded technology in a plant is ubiquitous-like sticky notes in an office. Built-in chips, programs, and processors run a wide array of equipment and applications that outnumber those in a general business environment by an estimated factor of ten. It's more complex and difficult to fix embedded technology than mainframes or desktop computers that run straightforward computer applications like accounting and finance. Unfortunately, manufacturing corporations were slow to acknowledge this huge problem and may find themselves backed into a corner on Y2K problems.

In a January 1998 Manufacturing Engineering article, George F. Girod, Keane Inc., alerted our readers to some of the year 2000 problems with plant floor systems and embedded technology. He also offered some advice and tips on identifying and dealing with Y2K issues. It doesn't matter whether your shop is big or small. No one is immune from attack by the Y2K Bug. If you haven't addressed these issues, now is the time to act.

The Y2K Bug has many faces and shows up in many places as well. To exterminate this bug, we need to learn about its appearance, habitat, and behavior. The most common Y2K Bug manifestation (or infestation), as mentioned earlier, has to do with using two digits to represent the year. Other date-related problems get lumped together and labeled as Y2K problems though, in the strictest sense, they aren't.

After the two-digit year representation, the next most common problem is 99 coding-using several nines as a special code to indicate things like a stop, end of file, or unknown date. Obviously, this particular variation is likely to show up in 1999. September 9, 1999 is a potentially troublesome date; but Julian date 99 which falls on April 9, 1999 could be a problem as well.

Leap year calculations also pose a potential problem. Some programmers failed to account for leap days in automated systems and caused incidents with serious and costly consequences. Programming that assumes all two-digit years fall in the same century is another potential problem.

Embedded technology is susceptible to the Y2K Bug, and tremendous potential exists for wreaking havoc for several reasons: quantity, variety, transparency, poor documentation, slow realization, and lack of resources.

Quantity. GM alone has 500,000 computerized, factory-floor devices. Think about the number of PLCs and CNC machine tools that exist-just for starters. Consider the number of business systems that exist, multiply it 10 times, and you begin to understand the scope of the problem. The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) cites this disturbing statistic: "An estimated 50 million devices ... embedded in automated systems are not year 2000 compliant."

Variety. Embedded processors take many forms-from a single chip, to a PC board, to a chassis with many modules. They can be found in many places. Machine tools, robots, and industrial controllers use them, as do heating and cooling systems, security systems, and power-generating equipment.

Besides the wide variety of hardware, there are a lot of different computer programs and many are not commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications. Proprietary software is common because COTS programs didn't exist when many industrial control/automation systems were first developed. Approximately 50% of manufacturing's standard software is written in COBOL. The rest is written in many different (sometimes, obscure) computer languages that create a figurative Tower of Babel. Over time, programmers added patches on top of patches.