Challenges and Demands for Distributed Automation in Industrial Environments

Abstract

The industrial automation domain is a key driver and supporter for other industries. With its innovations it can be seen as the backbone for many industrial sectors, like manufacturing, process technology, or the power and energy systems domain. The major trend and driving factor for industrial automation is the growing need for customized and individualized products and goods. Applied design methods and approaches strongly depend on the specific application field. Well known control approaches in industrial automation are computerized numerical control, robot control, programmable logic controller, distributed control system, and supervisory control and data acquisition. Such highly automated systems are mainly controlled by a vast set of embedded hardware and software components which are heterogeneous in nature. Such future automation environments are characterized by greater amounts of software usage. To cope with the challenges and demands of industrial automation and control systems a key design trend is to put components together into one reusable component.