What Is Industrial Automation

What is Industrial Automation, Their Types and Hierarchy of an
Industrial Automation System

Table of Contents [Hide]
 What is Industrial Automation, Their Types and Hierarchy of an Industrial Automation
System
o What is Industrial Automation?
o Why Industrial Automation? (Advantages of Automation System)
o Hierarchy of an Industrial Automation System
o Types of Industrial Automation Systems
 1. Fixed or Hard Automation
 2. Programmable Automation
 3. Flexible or Soft Automation
Today’s highly increasing competitiveness over the industry demands high quality and
most consistent products with a competitive price. To address this challenge number of
industries considering various new product designs and integrated manufacturing
techniques in parallel with the use of automated devices.
One of the remarkable and influential moves for getting the solutions of above mentioned
challenge is the industrial automation. Industrial automation facilitates to increase the
product quality, reliability and production rate while reducing production and design cost
by adopting new, innovative and integrated technologies and services.
What is Industrial Automation?

Automation takes a step further mechanization that uses a particular machinery
mechanism aided human operators for performing a task. Mechanization is the manual
operation of a task using powered machinery that depends on human decision making.
On the other hand, automation replaces the human involvement with the use of logical
programming commands and powerful machineries.
Industrial Automation is the replacement with computers and machines to that of human
thinking. The word Automation gives the meaning ‘self dictating’ or ‘a mechanism move
by itself’ that derived from the Greek
words Auto and Matos where auto means self while Matos means moving.
In a brief, industrial automation can be defined as the use of
set technologies and automatic control devices that results the automatic operation
and control of industrial processes without significant human intervention and achieving
superior performance than manual control. These automation devices include PLCs,
PCs, PACs, etc. and technologies include various industrial communication systems.
The above figure shows the power plant automation provided by Siemens for achieving
sustainable, safe and economic operations. It provides the total integrated automation
(TIA) by automating every section of power plant with efficient control devices, field
sensors and actuating devices. In this automation, SIMATIC modules (PLCs) are used as
control devices while WinCC provides an effective graphical interface.
Why Industrial Automation? (Advantages of Automation System)
 To increase productivity
Automation of factory or manufacturing or process plant improves production rate
through a better control of production. It helps to produce mass production by drastically
reducing assembly time per product with a greater production quality. Therefore, for a
given labor input it produces a large amount of output.
 To provide optimum cost of operation

Integration of various processes in industry with automated machineries, minimizes cycle
times and effort and hence the need of human labor gets reduced. Thus the investment
on employees has been saved with automation.
 To improve product quality

Since the automation reduces the human involvement, the possibility of human errors
also gets eliminated. Uniformity and product quality with a greater conformity can be
maintained with automation by adaptively controlling and monitoring the industrial
processes in all stages right from inception of a product to an end product.
 To reduce routine checks

Automation completely reduces the need for manual checking of various process
parameters. By taking advantage of automation technologies, industrial processes
automatically adjusts process variables to set or desired values using closed loop control
techniques.
 To raise the level of safety
Industrial automation increases the level of safety to personnel by substituting them with
automated machines in hazardous working conditions. Traditionally, industrial robots
and robotic devices are implemented in such risky and hazardous places.
Hierarchy of an Industrial Automation System
Industrial automation systems can be very complex in nature, having large number of
devices working in synchronization with automation technologies. The figure below
describes the hierarchical arrangement of the automation system consisting of different
hierarchical levels.
Field Level
It is the lowest level of the automation hierarchy which includes the field devices like
sensors and actuators. The main task of these field devices is to transfer the data of
processes and machines to the next higher level for monitoring and analysis. And also it
includes the controlling of process parameter through actuators. For instance, we can
describe this level as eyes and arms of a particular process.
Sensors convert the real time parameters like temperature, pressure, flow, level, etc into
electrical signals. This sensor data further transferred to the controller so as to monitor
and analyze the real time parameters. Some of the sensors include thermocouple,
proximity sensors, RTDs, flow meters, etc.
On other hand actuators converts the electrical signals (from the controllers) into
mechanical means to control the processes. Flow control valves, solenoid valves,
pneumatic actuators, relays, DC motors and servo motors are the examples of actuators.
Control Level
This level consists of various automation devices like CNC machines, PLCs, etc., which
acquires the process parameters from various sensors. The automatic controllers drive
the actuators based on the processed sensor signals and program or control technique.
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are most widely used robust industrial
controllers which are capable of delivering automatic control functions based on input
from sensors. It consists of various modules like CPU, analog I/O, digital I/O and
communication modules. It allows the operator to program a control function or strategy
to perform certain automatic operation on process.
Supervising and Production Control Level
In this level, automatic devices and monitoring system facilitates the controlling and
intervening functions like Human Machine Interface (HMI), supervising various
parameters, setting production targets, historical archiving, setting machine start and
shutdown, etc.
Mostly, either Distribution Control System (DCS) or Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) HMIs are popularly used in this level.
Information or Enterprise Level
This is the top level of the industrial automation which manages the whole automation
system. The tasks of this level include production planning, customer and market
analysis, orders and sales, etc. So it deals more with commercial activities and less with
technical aspects.
And also industrial communication networks are most prominent in industrial automation
systems which transfer the information from one level to the other. So these are present
in all the levels of automation system to provide continuous flow of information. This
communication network can be different one level to the other. Some of these networks
include RS485, CAN, DeviceNet, Foundation Field bus, Profibus, etc.
From the above hierarchy we can conclude that there is continuous information flow from
high level to low level and vice-versa. If we assume this graphical way, it is like a pyramid
in which as we go up, the information gets aggregated and while going down, we get
detailed information about the process.
Types of Industrial Automation Systems
1. Fixed or Hard Automation

This type of automation is employed to perform fixed and repetitive operations in order to
achieve high production rates. It uses special purpose or dedicated equipment to
automate the fixed sequence assembling or processing operations. Once it is employed,
it is relatively hard to change or vary the product design. Therefore, it is inflexible in
providing product variety, but increases the efficiency with higher production rate and
reduces unit cost.

Some of these automated systems are distilled process, paint shops and conveyors.
2. Programmable Automation
In this automation, a specific class of product changes and also assembling or processing
operations can be changed with the modification of control program in the automated
equipment.
This automation is best suited for batch production process where product volume is
medium to high. But in this, it is hard to change and reconfigure the system for a new
product or sequence of operations. Therefore, new product or reconfigure of sequence of
operations requires a long setup.
Examples of this automation system are numerically controlled machines, paper mills,
steel rolling mills, industrial robots, etc.
3. Flexible or Soft Automation

This automation system provides the automatic control equipment that offers a great
flexibility for making changes in the product design. These changes can be performed
quickly through the commands given in the form of codes by the human operators.
This automation allows the manufacturers to produce multiple products with different
ranges as a combined combination process rather than separate.
Some of the examples of this automation system are automatic guided vehicles,
automobiles, and multipurpose CNC machines.

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What is Industrial Automation, Their Types and Hierarchy of an

Industrial Automation System

What is Industrial Automation?

Why Industrial Automation? (Advantages of Automation System)

 To provide optimum cost of operation

 To improve product quality

 To reduce routine checks

Types of Industrial Automation Systems

1. Fixed or Hard Automation

reduces unit cost.

3. Flexible or Soft Automation

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