Industrial Automation

Industrial Automation
Automation plays an increasingly important role in the global economy, and the variety of computers and computer components for automation continues growing at an impressive rate. Manufacturers have long sought to automate production for many reasons - the main reasons being reducing costs to increase competitiveness, improving quality by eliminating human error, and enhancing safety by distancing employees from dangerous tasks.

The field of industrial automation is expansive and includes a huge range of end products ranging from network communications to physical control, all of which are necessary for the successful automation of production processes. Embedded computers are necessary for performing complex, real-time computations on a growing set of input parameters, while advanced network infrastructure technology provides reliable, low latency, high speed data communication over wide areas.

Industrial automation applications for computer products include:
  • Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC)
  • Human Machine Interface (HMI)
  • Remote Terminal Units (RTU)
  • Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
  • Distributed Control Systems (DCS)