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.
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 Internet of Things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data. The IoT allows objects to be sensed or controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention. When IoT is augmented with Industrial Automation, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyber-physical systems, which also encompasses technologies such as smart grids, virtual power plants, smart homes, intelligent transportation and smart cities. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure.