Megatrends of the future

I recently attended the user conferences of two of the major automation industry vendors, Citect and Rockwell Automation. The 'Citect Connects' User Conference and Rockwell’s RSTechEd were both held in August.

In his address to the Citect User Conference, Lionel Finidori, Pacific Zone managing director of Schneider Electric, said that his company sees a future where we all need to achieve more by using less of our common planet. While productivity and efficiency are always important issues, it is also now really a question of survival — survival not only for business in a competitive global environment, but also survival of our planet and our environment. He identified four key world ‘megatrends’ that impact the process automation industry:

• Energy and sustainability — Schneider expects energy needs to double in the next 30 years, so to keep an even carbon footprint efficiency must improve by 50%.
• Growth driven by new countries — China, India, Brazil and Eastern Europe are driving growth, and the impact of this in Australia has been seen in its effect on the resources sector.
• Everyone connected, everywhere, at any time — The global trend towards the internet being accessible everywhere will have an impact on how we perceive automation, and this is extending now also into other areas such as buildings, infrastructure and even housing.
• Simplicity, quality and ease of use — Customers are looking for ways to simplify the use of technology, as consumer products such as the Apple iPhone set new paradigms for ease of use in their respective technologies.

These trends are translating into an evolution from the traditional customer needs of safety, reliability and performance into new customer needs for solutions that drive the business outcomes required today and into the future.

So where will the next ‘big idea’ in industrial automation come from?

Predicting the future

Predicting the future is hard. Jim Pinto, industrial automation commentator and futurist, in presenting his keynote address at the Citect conference, said it is necessary to remove the 'rear-view mirror':

“The world is driving faster and faster while looking into the rear-view mirror. On a long straight road this is okay, but when the road curves, there’s no use looking in the rear-view mirror because you can’t see anything — it has changed,” he said.

Van Rafael, head of Rockwell Software Asia-Pacific, called this 'linear thinking', which is where we create ideas sequentially, imagining a future only in the context of the information we have today.

Rafael used the example of Arthur C Clarke, the famous sci-fi author and futurist. In 1945, he proposed the use of communication satellites in a geostationary orbit, which is now known as the Clarke orbit in his honour. Clarke once said that in predicting the future, “the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible”. In other words, he is encouraging us to look past our linear thinking and imagine how through innovation we can change our world.

Alvin Toffler was another famous futurist who, in his 1970 work Future Shock, predicted that “we are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs”. If we look at today, do we repair clothes or shoes much any more? Do we repair our mobile phones? They are cheaper to replace than repair. Will the Tata Nano, the Indian-made $2000 car, be thrown away or repaired? According to Rafael, the world is consuming more than ever before, faster than ever before and, if the manufacturing industry wants to keep up, we are going to have to know how to innovate.

Knowledge is power

Some kinds of knowledge are very powerful, and that knowledge is stimulated by information. In recent times, a great deal of technological knowledge has been embodied in software — we could call software 'embedded knowledge'. And thanks to the internet, information can be shared with anyone anywhere, and knowledge work can be done anywhere. The old paradigm that the ideas come from the powerful first-world countries is dead.

So what knowledge do we need to create the next revolution in automation technology? And how will today’s emerging technologies influence the future of plant automation?

Connected everywhere, all the time

While current estimates of the world market for computers are about 12 billion, how many sensors will there be? Possibly trillions? With new intelligent wireless sensors, it is becoming cheaper and easier to monitor more points and collect more information all the time.

With today’s technology, it is probably not possible to scale to a network of, say, five million points. Pinto points out that the current technology that still uses PLCs, and deterministic architecture, a 30-year-old technology, will need to be replaced with something that can deal with millions of independent intelligent sensors non-deterministically. Modern sensors are becoming smarter. Why would we need to monitor them all continuously, when devices with predictive diagnostics can tell us when they are in need of repair or maintenance?

There is one thing that all this new technology can provide, and that is the ability to capture, integrate and present many types of information in new ways. As Van Rafael points out, “This creates new insight, which in turn allows us to react quickly, with higher confidence, to the rapid-fire changes occurring all around us. The result is less time focused on how to get the right information, and more time acting on it. This frees us to imagine more of what’s possible, and maybe even circumvent linear thinking to find solutions that can help us do more, faster.”

This article is an excerpt from a feature to be printed in the October issue of What’s New in Process Technology magazine. To register for a free subscription, click here: http://www.processonline.com.au/magazine.