ARC’s European Industry Forum, part of the successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia, has been held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 15 - 17, 2023. The event offered exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies in line with this year’s topic “Managing Industry Evolution in Times of Global Disruption” to its 160 international participants from 20 countries.
Future Automation Architecture
Future Automation Architectures (FAA) refers to the influence of information technologies on automation architectures used in industrial production systems. After decades of using closed, proprietary systems, the industrial world in the future will rely more and more on technologies borrowed from the commercial world, such as virtualization and containerization.
The FAA session at ARC’s European Industry Forum invited a variety of end-users and suppliers to discuss their activities and views in an open forum. The session kicked off with Dr. Henning Löser of AUDI AG, who shared Audi’s vision of a virtualized environment in which nearly everything is software-defined. Ideally, new functions are delivered purely as software that runs on standard, generic hardware. Anand Srinivas from VMware provided additional insights on how virtualization technology from the IT world will benefit industrial users.