Open automation, starting with Schneider Electric

In October 2020, with Schneider Electric’s advocacy of “general Automation”, a new software-centric automation system, EcoStruxure™ Automation Expert (EAE), was officially launched.

It is understood that the EcoStruxure open automation platform is based on IEC 61499 standards and open automation principles, through the separation of automation applications and hardware, breaking the restrictions of proprietary systems and the dependence of the underlying hardware infrastructure, with portability, configurability, interoperability and other features, truly able to do “plug and play”.

AAI169-P00 This means industrial automation deployments are shifting to an asset-centric design approach, making IT easier to integrate IT applications, tools, and industrial technologies, and enabling unprecedented flexibility with a deep decoupling of hardware and software.

This announcement by Schneider Electric is a call for the entire industry to embrace the open automation trend, and all enterprises and individuals, such as industrial users, Oems, system integrators and general contractors (EPCs), have good reasons to join. Its own platform is also constantly upgrading and evolving, and has now been iterated to version 3.0, and has expanded into a unified control software platform that integrates discrete, hybrid and process industry operations.

In fact, the industrial field market is complex and dispersed, industrial automation products on the one hand to have enough commonality, in order to complete cross-industry coverage, but on the other hand, there must be enough pertinence, in order to deeply improve the AAI169-P00 fundamental production efficiency of a specific industry. This means that automation manufacturers must not only master the core technology, but also have deep insight to find and summarize the pain points and needs in the industrial front line, and create corresponding solutions.

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So what does the EcoStruxure open automation platform really bring to an industry and a factory? In the water industry, for example, aging infrastructure, high operating costs, high energy consumption, and loss of water resources are common challenges, but the modernization of water supply and wastewater automation solutions continues to be slow. What the industry really needs are solutions that reduce implementation costs while making it easier for future employees and, crucially, improve operational sustainability, such as significantly reducing energy consumption, CO2 emissions and water waste.

The EcoStruxure Open Automation AAI169-P00 platform can solve these problems as an advanced open automation solution. In the implementation and actual operation, the deep integration of IT/OT can make machine manufacturers, engineers, and plant operators have a more convenient operation experience. In terms of operational sustainability, the EcoStruxure open automation platform enables unified control of the treatment plant and the water collection and distribution system, increasing the circulability of the overall process, minimizing water consumption and reusing wastewater.

Beyond water, Schneider Electric’s automation solutions cover a wider range of industries. Since its release three years ago, the EcoStruxure open automation platform has been gradually applied to food and beverage, logistics and environmental utilities, seawater desalination, transportation and other industries. Among them, in the transportation industry, the platform combined with the controller was applied to the distributed area control unit in the utility tunnel, helping to reduce the engineering AAI169-P00 time of an underground integrated pipe corridor project in Xinjiang by about 30% and save about 15% maintenance costs.

In many enterprises, the EcoStruxure open automation platform has been shown to reduce the time required to perform traditional automation tasks by two to seven times, improve the speed of user development of application innovation by three times, and troubleshoot problems by six times. This is a real efficiency improvement for the factory line, and it is also a major premise for the implementation of more thorough efficiency changes in the entire industry.