Machinestate

Machinestate refers to the current condition or status of a machine or system, and it is used across manufacturing, automation, robotics, and computing. It encompasses operational mode, fault indicators, performance metrics, and contextual data such as temperature, position, speed, and energy consumption.

In industrial settings, machinestate is tracked by sensors, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and supervisory systems such as SCADA and manufacturing execution systems (MES). Operators and control software rely on machinestate to sequence operations, enforce safety interlocks, and plan maintenance or predictive maintenance. Common representations use finite state models with states such as Idle, Starting, Running, Paused, Stopping, and Fault, often linked to triggers and transitions.

In computing contexts, machinestate describes the state of a virtual machine, container, or other compute entity, including processor state, memory contents, I/O devices, and firmware or hypervisor state. This information supports tasks such as live migration, snapshotting, rollback, and fault recovery, enabling deterministic behavior across reboots or outages.

Modeling machinestate often employs state diagrams or state machines, with standards and practices drawn from IEC 61131-3 for PLC programming and UML for software design. Data about machinestate can be stored in a dedicated machine-state database or streamed from telemetry systems for real-time monitoring. Typical metrics include uptime, mean time between failures, mean time to repair, utilization, and energy consumption.

See also: state machine, industrial internet of things, PLC, SCADA, MES, virtualization.