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The future of industrial automation is wide open. What’s holding us back?
10 November 2021
Picture a future in which industrial organisations succeed by adjusting with agility to ever-changing supply and demand market conditions. New business models are supported in this environment by an open, non-proprietary platform that provides holistic control based on real-time management of business objectives.
Supply chains, business systems, operations, production, logistics, and customer service are all orchestrated by a seamless business, automation, and control system that integrates operations and core processes. Innovative industrial automation technologies enable processes to improve significantly. As a result, faster delivery, reduced costs, and faster cycle times for delivering products to customers can be achieved.
What is stopping us from unleashing the true power of digitisation and achieving this new level of innovation, unprecedented efficiency, and greater agility? The constraints are more historical and psychological than they are technical.
An explosion of very low-cost intelligent sensors and open computing platforms already simplify connectivity and system control and could enable the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. In fact, intelligence can now be distributed among software resources in the cloud, at the edge and embedded within controllers and field devices.
Advancements in technologies and the development of open standards are also combining to allow manufacturers to modernise without having to incur high core-system replacement costs or to disrupt ongoing operations.
Yet, many manufacturers are unable to accrue such benefits due to an attachment and dependency on proprietary automation system legacies.
A plug and produce open platform
Since most leading automation system suppliers today offer proprietary systems to end users, their customers are “locked in” to specific technologies. For many of these end users, migration to a different PLC/DCS supplier is highly challenging from a ROI perspective.
However, proprietary approaches limit access to innovation, increase total cost of ownership, and restrict the ability of manufacturing enterprises to adopt IT-world types of advancements. In the long run, plants inhibit their ability to evolve rapidly and to quickly establish marketplace advantages.
But it no longer has to be that way. Next-generation manufacturing or production operation should be centred around a common open-source architecture. This would follow the Internet and enterprise computing model driven by open standards. Industrial automation is really a use case of computing that has not matured enough to embrace these concepts. Look at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website to get an idea of the scope of standards in the computing industry. Industrial automation systems should only be a multivendor interoperable open platform to implement new manufacturing and production models.
Enter: IEC 61131
In this new environment, standards are extremely important for multivendor interoperability and seamless interfaces from supply chain through manufacturing and production to customer. The broadest programming standard for industrial automation and control today is IEC 61131-3. Due to the task structure of a full IEC 61131 implementation, event-driven, state and cyclical logic can be accomplished. There have been significant enhancements to IEC 61131 by the PLC open organisation including OPC UA for enterprise communications, remote procedure calls and controller to controller standardised data communication models. Another development is the international standard IEC 61499 that builds on IEC 61131 functions that defines a generic model for distributed control systems IEC 61499 features an event driven model built around functional blocks.
The big elephants in the room regardless of programming standard including IEC 61131 and IEC 61499 is the fact that traditional vendors have never fully embraced open implementations with code and function portability.
The Eclipse Foundation 4diac open-source project fostering the further development of IEC 61499 may be a step in the right direction if embraced by traditional automation vendors.
Solving portability, configurability, and interoperability
The answer may lie in the adoption of the IEC 61499 standard, which was originally developed in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. Because of the technology constraints at the time, the standard was not widely deployed. But now, given the evolution of technology, the IEC 61499 standard solves the problem of ensuring portability, configurability, and interoperability across vendors and, at the same time, software and hardware independence. Also, by accommodating and combining both scan-based and event-based mechanisms, the standard makes it easy for automation systems to adopt best practices coming from the IT world and to easily interface with enterprise systems. Moreover, the capability of reusing legacy systems through an IEC 61499-comaptible wrapper is being developed.
Organisations such as the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF), and the User Association of Automation Technology in Process Industries (NAMUR) are end user groups advocating for changes to the existing proprietary automation systems paradigm.
Many of the components are already in place to help redefine the industrial automation systems landscape. This includes the IEC 61499 standard and important automation vendors' interest in adopting open automation systems platforms. The future of industrial automation is wide open, and we must work together to create next-generation industrial technologies for a brighter future for our industries.
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