Industrial automation is a general term for information processing and process control such as measurement, manipulation, etc., achieved by machines, equipment or production processes without direct manual intervention. Automation technology is to explore and study the methods and technologies to realize the automation process. It is a comprehensive technology involving mechanical, microelectronics, computer, machine vision and other technical fields. The Industrial Revolution is the midwife of automation technology. It is precisely because of the needs of the Industrial Revolution that automation technology has broken through the egg shell and has developed vigorously. At the same time, automation technology has also promoted the progress of the industry. Nowadays, automation technology has been widely used in machinery manufacturing, electric power, construction, transportation, information technology and other fields, and has become the main means to improve labor productivity.

Industrial automation is one of the important prerequisites for Germany to start Industry 4.0, mainly in the fields of mechanical manufacturing and electrical engineering. At present, the "embedded system" widely used in German and international manufacturing is a special computer system designed for a specific application, which completely embeds mechanical or electrical components into the controlled device. Data show that the annual market benefit of this "embedded system" is as high as 20 billion euros, and this figure will increase to 40 billion euros by 2020.

The first stage of folding

1940s-early 1960s

Demand power: market competition, resource utilization, reducing labor intensity, improving product quality, and meeting the needs of mass production. Main features: This stage is mainly a stand-alone automation stage. The main features are: the emergence of various stand-alone automated processing equipment, and the continuous expansion of applications and development in the direction of depth. Typical achievements and products: CNC machine tools with hardware CNC systems.

The second stage of folding

The mid-1960s-early 1970s

Demand power: The market competition is intensifying, requiring fast product update, high product quality, and adapting to the needs of large and medium batch production and reducing labor intensity. Main features: This stage is mainly marked by automatic production lines. Its main features are: on the basis of stand-alone automation, various combined machine tools and combined production lines appear. At the same time, software numerical control systems appear and are used for machine tools. CAD, CAM and other software begin to be used. In the design and manufacture of the actual project, the hardware processing equipment at this stage is suitable for the production and processing of large and medium batches. Typical achievements and products: Automatic production lines for drilling, boring, milling, etc.

The third stage of folding

The mid-1970s--now

Demand power: Changes in the market environment have made the common problems in multi-variety, small and medium-sized batch production more and more serious, requiring automation technology to develop to its breadth and depth, so that all related technologies can be highly integrated and the overall best performance can be exerted. Main features: Since American scholars first proposed the concept of CIM in the early 1970s, great changes have taken place in the field of automation. Its main features are: CIM has been gradually accepted as a philosophy and a method; The corresponding technology integrates the decentralized and independent unit automation technology into an optimized whole. The so-called philosophy is that enterprises should analyze and overcome the existing "bottleneck" according to their needs, so as to realize the ideological strategy of continuously improving their strength and competitiveness; as the corresponding technology to achieve integration, it is generally considered as: data acquisition, distribution, sharing ; Network and communication; workshop layer equipment controller; computer hardware and software specifications, standards, etc. At the same time, as a management philosophy and working mode, concurrent engineering has been applied and active in the field of automation technology since the late 1980s, and will further promote the integration of unit automation technology. Typical achievements and products: CIMS factory, flexible manufacturing system (FMS).

Industrial automation is a trend that automatic control and automatic adjustment devices are widely used in industrial production to replace manual operation of machines and machine systems for processing and production. Under the conditions of industrial production automation, humans only indirectly take care of and supervise the production of machines. Industrial automation can be divided into: (1) Semi-automation according to its development stage. That is, some use automatic control and automatic devices, while the other part is produced by manual operation of machines. (2) Fully automated. Refers to all the processes in the production process, including loading, unloading, loading and unloading, etc., without the need for people to directly perform production operations (people only indirectly watch and supervise the operation of the machine), and the machine continuously and repeatedly automatically produces one or more. batch of products.