The Impact of Digitalization on the Future of Control and Operations

The notion of Internet of Things (IoT), as well as related topics like Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart Manufacturing, is currently attracting a lot of attention both within the process industries. Clearly, IoT offers many potential applications for automation, ranging from how to engineer the installation of new plants to production management and more intelligent maintenance schemes. However, the focus of this paper is on the control and operations. Most likely IoT leads to new SW architectures where more open standards will result. Through a better connectivity, information will be much easier available, which could result in that previously isolated functions will be more closely integrated. Here modeling at the right level of fidelity will be absolutely key. It can be expected that the importance of optimization will increase and this paper discusses some aspects related to the opportunities, challenges and changes triggered by IoT.