Pang Xingjian, Senior Vice President of Schneider Electric: Open automation will promote the industrial sector to become a platform and networked service system

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How to move toward carbon neutrality while reducing costs and increasing efficiency has become the focus of attention of industrial enterprises. On October 21st, Schneider Electric and Mechanical Industry Instrumentation Comprehensive Technical and Economic Research Institute (Instrumentation Institute) jointly built a laboratory and released the "Open Automation White Paper".

The white paper points out that compared with the rapid development of the IT field, the technology update cycle in the OT field is longer, and the traditional industrial automation system is basically based on the principles of the 1970s and 1980s, these industrial automation systems are relatively closed, and with the acceleration of the digitization process, the closedness and specialization greatly hinder the upgrading and innovation of industrial automatic systems, as well as the deep integration of OT and IT. Open automation has become an inevitable path for high-quality sustainable development of the industry, and it will also reduce user costs.

Open automation is usable, portable, reconfigurable, and interoperable, and the technologies related to open automation include architectures such as software and hardware, standard industrial communication, and model-based software engineering.

"One of the biggest advantages of open automation is that it can allow technicians to get rid of simple, repetitive, unnecessary labor, let technicians really do innovation, and hope to build an open automation market in the future, so that more technicians, R&D personnel and enterprises can transform their insight and understanding of the industry into open automation functions, and make greater contributions to the progress of the industry." Pang Xingjian, senior vice president of Schneider Electric and head of the Industrial Automation business in China, said.

Pang Xingjian said that the dual carbon target for China's development is both an opportunity and a challenge, will have a broad and far-reaching impact on China's economic structure, energy structure, production and consumption methods, Schneider Electric China is exploring a more targeted, more targeted and more targeted carbon neutrality and development path, providing a full life cycle of green intelligent manufacturing solutions, to help the high-quality development of the industry.

According to the cooperation framework agreement signed by Schneider Electric and Yizong Institute, the two sides will establish technology promotion and standardization cooperation in the fields of intelligent manufacturing and industrial Internet, and jointly create an open automation joint research and development laboratory. The joint R&D laboratory will focus on the application of IEC 61499 standards, technical training, testing and verification, industry promotion and ecological construction.

For the relevant research and development work after the completion of the laboratory, Ouyang Jinsong, director of the Institute of Yizong, said that first of all, it is necessary to create an ecology, including the improvement of the standard system, as well as the training and training of the expert team, as well as the shaping and extraction and combing of typical users and typical solutions, so that it becomes a sample that everyone can refer to, and adopts the method of taking the point with the surface; secondly, in the entire promotion and application process, it is also necessary to need some experimental verification platforms to test and verify the relevant standards, products, and solutions to see if they can run through; finally, On this basis, enterprises are welcome to jointly develop open automation-related hardware and software to help enterprises find technologies and products that meet application needs.

The "Industrial Energy Conservation Diagnostic Service Action Plan" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for the first time carried out energy-saving diagnostic service actions nationwide for enterprises with weak energy management foundations and key energy-consuming industries. Accelerating the cost reduction and efficiency increase of industrial enterprises is not only the inherent development needs of enterprises in the stage of industrial automation, but also the inevitable choice for industrial industries to achieve green development.

Ouyang Jinsong said, "In some discussions on the development of science and technology in the 14th Five-Year Plan, many experts have mentioned the development of intelligent automation technology, so that automation becomes more flexible from the original rigidity and more adapted to the individual needs of manufacturing user enterprises. "This coincides with the idea of open automation.

Automation transformation in the industrial field, for enterprises is most concerned about the cost of the problem.

Ouyang Jinsong said that the goal of open automation itself is to decouple software, hardware, and process binding into a large number of suppliers can participate in the automation of the test, so that more product providers participate in solving the user's problems, once standardized, whether it is follow-up costs or reconstruction costs are reduced, and will also greatly reduce the hardware waste caused by process changes.

Pang Xingjian also said that an important background of industrial automation is the whole life cycle of enterprises, that is to say, if the transformation is placed in the entire life cycle of enterprises, it will definitely save great costs, and this will reshape the industrial chain.

"In the past, talking about the industrial chain more refers to the relationship between the downstream and the single line, with the advent of open automation, there will be two huge changes, one is platformization, one is networking, the role of enterprises in the platform and network is flexible and changeable, users can also serve other users, which was difficult to imagine before." Pang Xingjian said that from the perspective of consumer interconnection, platformization and networking have become components in the real world, and with the promotion of open intelligence, the industrial field will also become a platformized and networked service system, using digitalization to improve enterprise efficiency and operational resilience, and accelerate innovation in the industrial field.