Future of Automation

Take the manufacturing domain as an example: The era when we had to choose between cheap, standardized, mass-produced products and customized, very expensive ones is nearly over. Production machines are very good at performing the same repetitive tasks at a high speed, but even today it’s still time-consuming for automation experts to reconfigure them.

Digitalization and the related emerging technologies – like artificial intelligence, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), digital twins, edge, and the cloud – brought about a profound change and will enable the creation of a new class of more flexible and easy-to-use automation solutions with a significantly reduced engineering effort.

• AI-enabled systems are aware of their environment. They’re capable of finding solutions autonomously without needing an expert to pre-configure them.
• Using open, prefabricated (and pre-engineered) modularized units with integrated and autonomous automation (like manufacturing cells and process models) facilitates a “plug-and-operate” system and fast, flexible commissioning.
• Augmented reality and smart operator assistants create new possibilities for virtual commissioning and support the collection of plant data in real time to provide information exactly where it’s needed.
• In manufacturing processes, applying AI technologies in quality control can help identify error patterns even during operation, which saves money.
• Sensor fusion technologies allow autonomous rail and road vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently.
• Building automation systems can be installed and commissioned with no deep automation and programming knowledge.