Industrial Overview
The industrial control and process automation market has advanced and evolved significantly in the last ten years. In response to increasing pressure to produce quality products at lower cost and faster time to market, manufacturers are moving away from mass production and are beginning to produce customized products on a large scale.
Unlike other industries, the lifecycle of industrial products and systems spans 10-20+ years. It is only within the last few years that companies have started incorporating software systems at all levels of production. To ensure sustainability, real-time operating systems and middleware vendors should be able to answer the need for increased reliability, robustness, re-configurability, maintainability and scalability.
Industrial Safety
The industrial market has strict requirements for control and automation device safety due to possible consequences associated with catastrophic system failures. The international standard IEC/EN 61508 is well established in the industrial process control and automation industry, for the functional safety of electrical / electronic, programmable electronic systems. IEC/EN 61508 SIL (Safety Integrated Level) levels are defined for system components in terms of probability of a dangerous failure and the corresponding required risk reduction.
Looking Ahead
The future landscape of industrial automation is calling upon its software engineers to develop energy efficient and intelligent embedded systems - more environmentally friendly software that uses less energy. Developing intelligent embedded systems hold the key to improving energy usage.
"Embedded systems can be the most powerful solution to this [climate change] crisis." Al Gore, Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), April 2007