Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
ARC’s European Industry Forum, part of the successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia, has been held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 15 - 17, 2023. The event offered exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies in line with this year’s topic “Managing Industry Evolution in Times of Global Disruption” to its 160 international participants from 20 countries.
Future Automation Architecture
Future Automation Architectures (FAA) refers to the influence of information technologies on automation architectures used in industrial production systems. After decades of using closed, proprietary systems, the industrial world in the future will rely more and more on technologies borrowed from the commercial world, such as virtualization and containerization.
The FAA session at ARC’s European Industry Forum invited a variety of end-users and suppliers to discuss their activities and views in an open forum. The session kicked off with Dr. Henning Löser of AUDI AG, who shared Audi’s vision of a virtualized environment in which nearly everything is software-defined. Ideally, new functions are delivered purely as software that runs on standard, generic hardware. Anand Srinivas from VMware provided additional insights on how virtualization technology from the IT world will benefit industrial users.
Such an environment might be managed with tools from Software-Defined Automation (SDA), a start-up that is building the tools to deploy and manage whole fleets of both traditional hardware controllers and virtual controllers, according to Philip Ketterer of SDA. Samuel Greising of FLECS Technologies described his company’s cooperation with SDA on workload consolidation, which aims to reduce automation system complexity through virtualization and clearly defined, unified interfaces. SDA provides a unified interface for managing real-time control workloads across different vendors, while FLECS simplifies and automates the management of containerized apps. Both companies help create a platform that provides factories with a convenient solution to manage a mixture of hardware and virtual PLCs and related applications in both greenfield and brownfield systems.
Codesys has been the main vendor for OEM soft PLCs for decades. It’s clear that they are going to play an active role in the migration to virtualized architectures, and Patrik Hug of Codesys described his company’s vision and contributions to the development of this trend.
Is virtualization only interesting for discrete manufacturers? Not so, said Luis Duran of ABB. The process industry market leader has been hard at work creating the future of the virtual process automation system. While products and solutions may not be available for some time, Luis described ABB’s vision, which foresees a virtual DCS accompanied by a managed virtual enjoinment for third party process applications.
ARC’s European Industry Forum & Platform
We like to thank our sponsors, who supported the ARC EIF 2023, and all our speakers and presenters, who made the event interesting, exciting and memorable.`
To complement the Forum, ARC Europe offers its online platform https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/en/, accessible 365 days a year. Its goal is to maintain the flow of information, and to foster network opportunities. On the platform you will find information concerning relevant economic developments and information on automation markets, as well as our quarterly industry webinars.
Materials and presentations from the Forum will be made available on our platform https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/en/ after registration, depending on the package chosen. Forum attendees can download presentation slides, view video recordings and receive further materials on the platform.
For more information, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:ablech@arcweb.com).