A Journey Toward Autonomous Operations

With process industries moving closer to being autonomous, many operating companies are implementing unattended operations. This is especially true for highly complex, remote, and hazardous facilities. But there are other ways for companies to adopt industrial autonomy, such as building greenfield autonomous plants and deploying autonomous technologies and components in existing plants.

Not only can production processes be made autonomous, so can higher-level functions. Autonomy could expand beyond its traditional focus on controls and efficiency to include safety, reliability, margin optimization, compliance, supply chain management, and other manufacturing functions.

Achieving autonomy even on a small scale in the process industries can bestow benefits. Increased integration of automation and domain applications, for instance, will eliminate human error, provide uninterrupted operations, and remove people from remote or hazardous environments.

In the short to mid-term, completely autonomous plants will be unlikely, but expect to see some functions becoming autonomous to some level based on the application, needs, and cost-benefit ratio.