Simply put, an ecosystem is an assemblage of organisms living together interdependently and functioning as a loose unit. Replace the word "organism" with the term "automated equipment" -- something that's not alive but lively nonetheless -- and the parallels jump out at you, clear as the lunch bell.

Why the analogy? Because it's important for manufacturers to rethink what automation architectures are. A decade ago they were closed, self-sufficient systems that didn't need anything but some bits and bytes to survive. They did the job -- which was to control a single function or process -- and they were a reliable, important element in keeping production lines going. But getting information out of those cloistered systems was nearly impossible.

As the world changes, demands on manufacturers intensify. Industrial companies need to extract data from many different pieces of equipment, assemble it and manage it from a single system, and deliver it to the enterprise. They need interoperability -- but they won't give up reliability, security, and the granularity of being able to control even the tiniest sensor tucked away in a pipeline. And they won't -- because they can't afford to -- rip and replace systems.

Recognizing these requirements and constraints, automation vendors such as ABB Inc. (Zurich, Switzerland), Emerson Process Management (St. Louis, MO), GE Fanuc (Charlottesville, VA), Honeywell (Phoenix), Invensys Process Systems (Foxboro, MA), Rockwell Automation (Milwaukee, WI), Schneider Electric Co. (Palatine, IL), and Siemens Energy & Automation Inc. (Alpharetta, GA) have revamped their technology platforms over the past several years. Collectively, they've spent millions of dollars redesigning their systems to expand their reach both horizontally (controlling lots of things, rather than just one) and vertically (communicating with business systems).

The results of all this hard work have trickled out in various forms over the last few years, but most vendors finally have a full arsenal of multi-disciplined, standards-based platforms that support sophisticated applications such as asset management, analytics, and the ability to lower total cost of ownership through cross-functional programs.

And, in fact, the structures are radically different from earlier generations of control architectures. "You can't even think about them as architectures anymore," says Dave Woll, vice president of consulting at ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA). "You have to think of them in terms of features."

According to Woll, today's control systems -- which he defines as a bunch of applications collapsed onto a single backbone -- are a result of information technology's influence on manufacturing, particularly Ethernet IEEE 802.3, which is based on TCP/IP. It's a very different architecture from the token-passing 802.4 that was "proprietary in nature, had supervisory applications at one layer, controllers at another layer, and field devices at the end of a proprietary network...Ethernet forced them to come up with new architectures because they had to tear out the heart of the old ones," Woll says.

The shift was rather drastic, but also a necessary step in getting the factory floor to operate as part of a larger corporate infrastructure, using Ethernet as the physical pipe, TCP/IP as the common communication protocol, and applications as information generators. Today it's a much more interdependent ecosystem that connects production and business systems -- kind of like a river feeding into the ocean.

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Stephanie Neil is the Senior Editor for Managing Automation. Ms. Neil's editorial focuses on factory floor technologies, including MES, process control systems and robotics.