Where do we see future of Plant Automation heading?

The large, centralized production plant is a thing of the past. The factory of the future will be small, movable (to where the resources are, and where the customers are).

For example, there is really no need to transport raw materials long distances to a plant, for processing, and then transport the resulting product long distances to the consumer. In the old days, this was done because of the localized know-how and investments in equipment, technology and personnel. Today, those things are available globally.

Industrial automation can and will generate explosive growth with technology related to new inflection points: nanotechnology and nanoscale assembly systems; MEMS and nanotech sensors (tiny, low-power, low-cost sensors) which can measure everything and anything; and the pervasive Internet, machine to machine (M2M) networking.

Real-time systems will give way to complex adaptive systems and multi-processing. The future belongs to nanotech, wireless everything, and complex adaptive systems.

Major new software applications will be in wireless sensors and distributed peer-to-peer networks – tiny operating systems in wireless sensor nodes, and the software that allows nodes to communicate with each other as a larger complex adaptive system. That is the wave of the future.

sofisticated plants like chemical plants where chances of contamination is more need to be automated but we should not also forget that plants with higher productivity is acheived if we produce more products with less effort and cost. if we also automate plants with high rate of production like  manufacturing plants where to manufacture a component will be easy e.g if i want to make a forming tool by cnc it will take less time. today in this fast growing world time is money. hence by automating plants with higher productivity , products will be less costly and also our GDP will increase