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Industrial automation is the use of various control devices like PC’s/PLC’s/DCS, used to
have control on various operations of an industry without significant intervention from
humans and to provide automatic control performance. In industries, control strategies
use a set of technologies which are implemented to get the desired performance or
output, making the automation system most essential for industries.
Industrial automation involves usage of advanced control strategies like cascade controls,
modern control hardware devices as PLC’s, PLC’s,sensors and other instruments for
sensing the control variables, signal conditioning equipments to connect the signals to
the control devices, drives and other significant final control devices, standalone
computing systems, communication systems, alarming and HMI (Human Machine
Interface) systems.
Manual control
Automation Structure
Sensor level is also called as process layer. It uses the sensors and actuators to get the
values of the process variables in continuous or periodical manner. These act as eyes
and arms of the industrial processes. Some of these instruments includepneumatic
instruments, smart instruments, etc.
Automation control level or control layer uses industrial control devices like
PC’s/PLC’s/DCS, etc. This level utilizes the various embedded processors, PID
algorithms to control the process.
Automation Layers
Supervising level or SCADA layer gets lots of channel information and stores the data in
the system database. It acquires data from various control devices and displays them on
HMI’s (Human Machine Interface). It also gives alarm to indicate the levels of the process
and control variables. It uses special software to get the data and communication
protocols to interact with the field devices.
Enterprise level performs the tasks like scheduling, orders and sales, product planning,
etc.
1. Fixed Automation
Programmable Automation
2. Programmable Automation
3. Flexible Automation
It is the extension for the programmable automation. This offers a greater flexibility to deal
with product design variations. Operators can give commands in the form of codes in the
computer program if wants to change the sequence of the process. Lower level
equipments receive the instructions to operate at the field level without losing the
production time. This type of automation is used in manufacturing multipurpose CNC
machines, automatic guided vehicles, etc.
Flexible Automation
4. Integrated Automation
In this type total system is fully automated under computer control. Starting from
designing process to the dispatching, whole system is completely automated. Even the
equipment is handled by the robots. This system is used in computer integrated
manufacturing systems.
Automation Equipments
Some of the sensors and actuators have the capability to communicate with the industrial
field communication buses which comes under the smart devices.
Industrial computers
Programmable Logic controllers (PLC’s) also called as industrial computers are
capable of being programmed to perform certain control functions. It consists of a CPU
or processor, I/O modules (both analog and digital) to connect the various input/output
devices and relay modules. These may be modular which is of fixed typeor integrated
types to extend modules based on the inputs available.
Along with the PLC’s, conventional PC’s are used to control the process by online or by
changing the programs. PLC’s comes with dedicated software to program the control
strategy.
Communication system
In industries many sensors, actuators, controlling PC’s and other control devices are
geographically distributed and interacting with each other via several data buses. There
are three types of buses used in the industrial automation i.e., factory bus, process bus,
and the field bus.
Field bus interacts between field instruments and the control devices while the process
bus connects the supervising level computers to the control devices like PLC’s. Factory
bus connects the higher level of the organization to the supervising level. Different
protocols are used for the communications like RS-485, profibus, CAN control
modbus,etc.
Thank you for spending your valuable time with this article and hope that you have
understood what industrial automation is. Here is a question for you regarding
automation,
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