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0 pointsPaulWaldman2y ago0 comments

The industrial automation industry is highly risk adverse. In some systems, like safety, this mentality is justified without proper migration plans. In other areas, it's alarming, like choosing to run a system on hardware that has been out of support for 30+ years without adequate spare parts.

Operation/Shop floor technologies (OT) are treated like mechanical equipment, "When it fails, we'll swap it out for a new one." Well, this isn't a motor, it has programming, and it interfaces with I/O sensors and devices.

The main challenge is the lack of knowledge and skills in modern technologies among technical staff and decision makers in industrial organizations.

A an aside, in my early days I hopped on a 5-hour flight and drove 6 hours to replace a failed hard drive in a Windows NT machine used as an HMI. Then a year later, replaced it and all the other clients with a vSphere stack. The local resources, both internal and external, were too intimidated to touch it.

I'd be in favor of a "reset" in automation, it feels like fighting city hall.

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Aerbil3132y ago

What is the real solution for highly complex technology like IT, as end times are coming?

It's a critical issue. Resources are wasted, and soon we won't be able to waste as much as we did, as the abundance era is coming to an end. The desire and need for higher efficiency through highly complex technology is only to increase, as the population gets older and older.

I can easily see mandatory IT training (like the current mandatory army training in some countries) and states standardizing certain technologies to avoid fragmentation and thus freezing progress, for good reasons. Like forbidding any database to be used in production except 3 most complete ones or banning all web frameworks except React and Svelte (arbitrary). It's not that they won't want progress, but they won't be able to afford progress and the resulting skill fragmentation in the IT workers while people are hungry and money is ever tighter.

cashsterling2y ago

I agree with everything you said... but there are a lot of areas in control system engineering that would benefit from having really robust hardware designs coupled with guaranteed correctness that Rust/Ada provide, and then all of the upside of all of the advanced control programming that is relatively easy in a modern programming language.

Beckhoff & B&R Automation are part of the way there. They both have some really slick portfolios. IMO, on paper, these are the two most advanced control system companies (with large sales volume).

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