What Is An ‘Automation’?

I would prefer to descript the word as a combination of hardware (including Mechanical as well as electrical) and software in order to provide a system Self-Dictated so that a routine or a process or task is performed automatically with minimum supervisory.

The hardware, mechanical system, provides a mechanism for the physical requirement of work. Whereas, the electrical system, provides energy to the mechanism resulting a driving event occur such as an indicating light lit up, a door opened or an alarm turned ON. The hardware however is to be monitor and control by the use of a control system such as a Microcontroller (also known as embedded system), PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) or a Computers.

In the early stage of automation, most system is controlled by microcontroller technologies. The code running at microcontroller are normally written using Assembler language or ANSI C programming language. Due to the development cost increase rapidly in more complicated system and time to market concern, engineer start integrate the system with PLC. All the PLC procedure are represented by symbolic structure (also known as Ladder Diagram), which is believe to be more easy to use, easy to learn with minimum effort as well as easy to maintain.

Often, a Human Machine Interface (HMI), formerly known as Man Machine Interface (MMI) are usually implemented in order to let human interact or communicate with machine such as entering operation data into a particular system. As such, the design of the User Interface will strongly reflect to the Effectiveness and Efficiency of a system as well as Satisfaction, Learnability to the user and Productivity to the production floor.

A well design User Interfaces may appear to Ensure Operational Safety, Reduce Operation Error and Improve Productivity. As a result, A GUI PC Based system is being widely used in recent development. In fact, due to its flexibility in networking, a scalable system can be carefully integrated in order to support Quality issues and flexibility in manufacturing process, productivity as well as cost reduction.

One of the most popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to me is the Microsoft Visual Basic (one of the products family of Microsoft Visual Studio), which provides all of the computing power necessity, stable and can be easily master the language without hire any guru. Others such as MatLab and LabView are widely introduced at local universities. Others such as C++ and Delphi is also widely used.

The advance of the technologies has seriously replacing human operators in almost any industrial process due to its accuracy, speed, and precision, which would significantly lead to severe unemployment. However, the overall effect of this is remained unclear. This is because skillful workforce is still required to design and maintain such system. Today, innovation has rapidly changed the advance of technology, more and more complicated system was created and needed in the industry field. Thus, the demand for the skillful workforce is dramatically increase.

Automation seems to be appeared to have changed the employment system, which may increase the cost of workmanship. Eventually, what benefit does ‘Automation’ to the industry? The answer is the increasing in productivity (output) and reduction of manufacturing cost, which lead to the increasing in buying power.

At last but not least, Automation not only appear in the industrial (Industrial Automation), it appear in many form such as Home Automation, Test Automation and Software Automation (also known as Macro). The OLE Automation is another form of automation developed by Microsoft Technology, which allowed information sharing and services across process and machine boundaries. As a result, you can manipulate an application’s object from outside the application. In other word, you may have multiple features such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel in a single application.