What Is Industrial Automation?

Industrial automation is the use of control systems to operate machines and processes in factories, plants and utilities with little or no manual work. Sensors measure what is happening, controllers decide what to do, and actuators such as motors, valves and robots carry it out, many times a second and without tiring.

The aim is consistent quality, higher throughput, safer work and lower running costs. It applies in two broad settings. Discrete manufacturing makes countable items such as cars, electronics and packaged food. Process industries handle continuous flows such as chemicals, water, oil and power, where the equipment is often called a distributed control system (DCS).

Most plants are automated in layers built up over decades, so a typical site mixes new and old equipment, several network types and controllers from more than one vendor.

Textbooks usually group automation by how easily it changes from one product to another.

The international standard ISA-95, published as IEC 62264, describes an automated plant as levels, from the process itself up to business planning. Each level works on a different time scale and talks to the one above and below it.

Industrial computers sit mainly at level 2, as operator panels, SCADA and vision stations, and increasingly as edge computers that collect data from level 1 and pass it up to levels 3 and 4.

The programmable logic controller (PLC) is the core of most automated machines. It reads inputs, runs a control program in a fixed cycle and sets outputs, typically programmed in the IEC 61131-3 languages. Analog and digital signals from sensors reach it through I/O modules, either in the PLC rack or on remote data acquisition and I/O modules nearer the machine.

Devices talk over fieldbuses and industrial Ethernet. Modbus, the oldest open industrial protocol, is still everywhere, alongside PROFINET, EtherNet/IP and EtherCAT. OPC UA is widely used to move data between levels in a vendor-neutral way, often through an IIoT gateway that bridges plant and IT networks.

PLCs handle hard real-time control well, but many automation tasks need more computing power, storage or a graphical display. That is where industrial PCs come in:

Automation pays back through output and consistency. A line that runs to the same program every cycle makes fewer errors, wastes less material and can run through the night. It also takes people out of dangerous, heavy or repetitive work, and the data it produces shows exactly where time and quality are being lost.

The trade-offs are cost, complexity and dependence on the control system. Automated equipment needs engineers to maintain it, spare parts for controllers that may be in service for 15 to 20 years, and security, since a networked plant is exposed in ways a manual one is not. IEC 62443 is the international series of standards for securing these industrial control systems.

Our page on computers for manufacturing and factory automation shows how these layers come together on real production lines.

We supply industrial PCs for HMI, SCADA, vision and edge data roles, with the I/O, fieldbus interfaces and operating system image each line needs fitted and tested as standard.