Conservative, stodgy, slow to adapt, slow to change…

These terms have all been applied to manufacturing companies and the suppliers that provide automation products and services for them. Automation World wanted to start the new year by looking at the ideas and innovations that have driven automation, and at the technologies developing now that will impact automation in the future.

To be sure, there are plenty of pundits who can point to reasons for concern about the state of innovation in the automation industry. And as always, there is a need for industry leaders to remain vigilant to the task of pushing the state-of-the-automation-art forward at a practical pace that supports and maintains profits and productivity advances. But this article and the two companion feature articles that follow (see “ The State of Innovation in Automation ,”, and “ Automation World Readers Voice Innovation Needs and Concerns ,”) show that innovation and technology adoption are alive and well in the industry.

For this article, Automation World sought out the people who are paid to constantly survey the world of technology and direct engineering operations of their companies; our goal was to determine what advances to the state-of-the-art of automation may be on the horizon, and to perhaps provide readers with a glimpse of their own automation futures. The views of these experts vary, but technologies adapted from commercial “high tech” markets permeated the thinking that has advanced automation—and will lead the way to the future.

PC drivers

Comments from James Truchard, president and chief executive officer of automation supplier National Instruments Corp., in Austin, Texas, drive right to the point. “Over the last 10 years, the most significant innovations in automation have come from incorporating personal computer (PC) technologies into industrial devices. It’s now common to see industrial versions of floating point processors, DRAM (dynamic random access memory), solid-state storage devices such as CompactFlash, fast Ethernet chip sets and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in industrial control products,” Truchard says. “This has enabled vendors and end-users to develop more powerful software with the flexibility and usability of PC-based control systems that can run on real-time operating systems for reliability. Industry analysts at ARC Advisory Group (an analyst firm in Dedham, Mass.) named these devices programmable automation controllers, or PACs. PACs offer the same ruggedness and reliability of a PLC (programmable logic controller), but tend to be much faster and more flexible.”

The theme of open systems is echoed by Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer at Emerson Process Management, another Austin, Texas-based automation supplier, who reflects on his years in the process business. “Every vendor spent a boatload of money to develop open systems, say from about 1993 until about 2002,” Zornio point out. “We went from building automation systems that were purpose-built with their own networking and hardware to today’s automation systems with the same fundamental technology as the information technology (IT) area except for actual controllers and devices.

“Customers wanted easy integration and lower-cost hardware from the PC market,” Zornio adds, “but they didn’t bank on the increased support and security problems. Now they are pushing back, which will precipitate the next area of innovation.”

Zornio, whose company has invested heavily in wireless technology, also notes, “Of course, I’m going to say wireless [is a major advance].” According to his analysis, wireless may not yet have had the transformative effect on today’s automation systems as some advances seen in the past. But Zornio expects that continuing innovations in wireless will make a significant impact on automation systems of the future.

Sujeet Chand, senior vice president and chief technology officer of supplier Rockwell Automation Inc., in Milwaukee, links information and communications. “The evolution of information and communication technologies is having a transformative impact on the design, operation and maintenance lifecycle of industrial automation systems,” he says.

Networking impact

“In the design phase, advances in mechatronics and simulation technologies allow us to simulate and verify the performance of machines and manufacturing systems before building them. The ‘CAD-to-part’ lifecycle can now be a continuum, with bi-directional flow of information. This allows manufacturing companies to drive continuous improvement in time-to-market, quality and production.” Chand observes. “For the operation and maintenance phases of the lifecycle, the rapid adoption of standard Ethernet in industrial automation and the application of Web interoperability standards are enabling the integration of factories with IT and business systems, and helping manufacturing companies drive plant-wide and supply chain optimization.”

Many cite networking in general as a significant innovative technology. Says Raj ...