ISA Org: DIFFICULT GROWTH
Manufacturing is following the same path as agriculture. As productivity rises, employment falls, Intelligence, modularity, and remote diagnostics are the trends of the future. Decentralized automation allows distributing intelligent automation components across the plant. Smart pumps are just one example for these units whose electronics are increasingly integrated within the aggregates, thus allowing new forms of communication and interaction.
New biotechnological processes represent new challenges for automation, particularly in pharmaceuticals and biotech-based fine chemical production. Minireactors and microreactors will bring new challenges for automation as well.
In general, automation technologies will benefit substantially from vertical integration with the information technologies used for management processes. Important growth is emerging at the interface, where both worlds meet-the manufacturing execution systems.
Optimization, statistical quality control, and product tracing/tracking are a few examples. Horizontal integration of core processes with the utilities remains an area of progress and growth as well. However, automation is not going to explode forever.
The humanless factory and plant will not materialize yet for many years. Highly automated plants are more flexible than totally automated plants. Moreover, the former has higher availability as well as lower maintenance and investment costs.
Ary: Interesting graphs at the end of the article
