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By Riky Comini, Global Director of Industrial Automation,
Molex, LLC.
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The development of Industry 4.0 technologies
has accelerated at a rapid pace. There
is cause for optimism that the future of
industrial automation will be scalable, open,
and integrated. Explore some of the top
trends destined to impact machine builders
and plant operations.
The Future of Industrial Automation
Distributed Control
M
ost industrial automation systems today
utilize centralized control strategies with the
programmable logic controller (PLC) at the core.
PLC-centric solutions provide limited remote access,
no security or machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, and
separated safety control. In a Master-Slave system, autonomous
devices can hardly coexist, as all the inputs/outputs from sensors
or to actuators must be wired to/from a PLC directly or through
some active or passive devices (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Today's industrial
automation system block
diagram. (Source Molex)
