More than two hundred years ago, the concept of “telephone” was formally formed and gradually developed into an indispensable communication tool for human society. It was not until the emergence of smart phones around 2010 that the explosive development and subversive change of the industry was truly realized.

2711-T10C20 There is no doubt that intelligence, or wisdom, is the driving force for the great development of the industry. This is the capability that the industry of the future is most eager to acquire. As the industry that affects human society most widely and most deeply, the improvement of its efficiency also means that human society has the opportunity to further develop.

In the process of industrial intelligence, “opening up” has laid the foundation for new technological innovation. IT means that breaking the barriers and restrictions of hardware and software, accelerating the integration between IT/OT, is the necessary baptism of industry into the digital wave. However, due to the complexity of the industrial system, the precision of the instrument kit and the complexity of the process flow, the closure of the industrial field has become the objective status quo in the past few decades. Once promoted the rapid development of industrial automation “closed”, in the digital era has become a shackle to the development of the industry, with the integration and sinking of IT technology in the field, “open” will present a process from quantitative change to outbreak.

Open automation will not only leverage the trillions of markets hidden in the future industry, 2711-T10C20 but also set off a deeper level of flexibility and openness in the industrial era – it pursues “reusable”, “portable”, “reconfigurable” and “interoperable”.

This is exactly what users in the automation space are eager to accelerate. In the face of the established future trend of open automation, as a representative of old industrial automation manufacturers, Schneider Electric’s choice is to take the initiative and accelerate the embrace. This is also the opportunity for the EcoStruxure open automation platform to be released.

Before crossing the threshold of the industrial future

In recent years, with the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, concepts such as Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing and industrial Internet have become popular. Its fundamental purpose is to optimize industrial processes, boost industrial efficiency, and ultimately strengthen the profitability of the industrial sector.

However, the common problem facing automation enterprises is that there are still a large number of barriers and barriers when the industrial automation industry wants to take advantage of the advantages brought by “openness” – from the system point of view, the industrial automation architecture is still relatively closed, lacking a more open and discrete design; In terms of details, PLC, DCS and other control systems have been implemented for a long time, but there is a lack of more general control system configuration and configuration language.

At the same time, the hardware and software of the two are deeply bundled, and the factory will choose to stay in the “closed” state in order to avoid the risk that the communication protocol conversion cannot be realized when the hardware and software are upgraded. This is actually limited by the manufacturer, because in this situation, the factory can not carry out more flexible data collection, can not take a more unified plan for the digital foundation, more difficult to deploy emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in a timely manner, and its high-quality development process has encountered obstacles.

2711-T10C20 When applied to the automation deployment of factories, the limitations of these issues become very specific. For example, the closure and separation of the system directly lead to IT/OT integration difficulties, data is difficult to achieve free and safe movement, and hardware, sensing, control and information modules that should form a complete system can only exist as data islands.

Fundamentally, because of the exclusivity and closure of the hardware and software bundle of the traditional automation system, the development of its IT level is limited to a certain extent. However, in this era of rapid digital development, only software systems that can be immediately upgraded, long-term reuse, and complete the decoupling of software and hardware can become high-quality assets of the industry and help the industry boost efficiency.

In addition to the technical development level, “opening up” is actually an important development demand of industrial enterprises. In real factory operations, enterprises do not want each of their control systems to be tied to the scope of a fixed manufacturer’s system – “closed” although to a certain extent means stability, but it is difficult to cope with complex and changing technical needs.

Therefore, enterprises want more open systems and achieve the openness and modularity of intelligent manufacturing systems, which is crucial for the efficiency of the process and the timely integration of new technologies. They also expect system-level manufacturers like Schneider 2711-T10C20 Electric to take the first step to open up.

In order to meet the demands of the industrial Internet and the future industrial era, a group of enterprises represented by Schneider Electric see the opportunity for hardware and software decoupling, which will be an important breakthrough for the industry to move toward more thorough open automation.

In 2020, Schneider Electric officially issued the Open Automation (Universal Automation) initiative, which has become a highly influential statement in the international automation industry. To fully realize the industrial vision of the future, the company needs to reimagine the technology model, open the platform, decouple the software from the hardware, and fundamentally improve the agility and scalability of the system.

In fact, more companies and organizations have joined the “open automation” trend, and the industry has deeply recognized that the next generation of industrial automation must break away from the current pattern of proprietary closed models.

Currently, there are a number of open automation organizations with a high degree of synergy initiatives, including the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF), the International Association of Process Industry Automation Users (NAMUR), and the Open Platform Communications Foundation (OPC). OPAF has adopted IEC 61499 in its O-PAS standard system, which is also the standard followed by Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Open Automation platform.

In short, the emergence of open automation will make the standardization of hardware and the generalization of software easier to achieve in the industrial field. IT engineers can better adapt to the operation mode of OT, and collect data in a more reasonable and convenient way, so that the entire information process can be truly digitized. OT engineers can also take advantage of the advanced nature of IT technology in a familiar environment, and no longer have to face complex and disparate equipment standards, thus reducing maintenance costs.

All in all, the convergence of OT and IT can happen in a natural and easy way. This will open the magic switch for a factory, break the gap in data flow, achieve countless small links to improve the efficiency, and then drive the entire industrial chain to complete the open automation upgrade.