Connected Plant @ EIF 2025

ARC’s European Industry Forum is part of our successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia. The next European Forum will be held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 5-7, 2025 and focus on “One Step Beyond: How to Achieve Next-Level Production”. Participants are invited to attend exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies from the digital front lines. ARC industry analysts and other experts from the end user and supplier communities will analyze and discuss trends and drivers for hot industry topics, such as:

Safety and Security

in this track we will look at the impact of cybersecurity on OT brownfield applications. Cyber security is becoming increasingly important in industrial OT applications. This is being driven by the shortage of cyber experts with OT knowledge, the complex operation of attack detection software and the networking of IIoT components with automation systems. This is leading to an increasing number of OT vulnerabilities. At the forum, Operators/system partners will demonstrate how compliance with the current cyber security guidelines can be easily ensured in brownfield applications. It will also show how operators/system partners can harden IIoT applications that are networked with automation systems against cyber-attacks.

Industrial Data Management

Data management in industrial enterprises has become significantly more important in recent years as industrial companies have begun to mine valuable data from industrial processes that were previously difficult to reach. But many organizations don’t have the adequate staff in place to manage these data. In the IT world, DataOps (data operations) refers to a set of practices that improves the integration and automates the flow of data within an organization, to improve quality, speed and collaboration between data managers and data consumers. DataOps in industrial applications means applying these practices to the management of data generated by industrial processes. 

Future Automation Architectures

Machine automation architectures today look much like architectures of 25 years ago. Except for the use of industrial Ethernet, not much has changed for machine automation architectures in the last decades. Each provider delivers and commissions his own machine on-site, while a system integrator connects the machines. Yet, thanks to initiatives like Industry 4.0 and IIoT, the gates are open for commercial technologies to influence the traditional, closed world of industrial automation. Following the IT trend to hyper-converge architectures and realize nearly every function in software, automation architectures in the near future will undergo a virtualization of traditional hardware-based control systems. Expect to see non-time-critical software consolidated on a server or in the cloud, while real-time controllers are virtualized on a common platform. Yet, many machine builders lack the IT skills necessary to realize them, and some have concerns about IP protection. Moreover, virtualized solutions many not (yet) offer the performance needed for hard real-time control. So there are many benefits to software-defined automation architectures, but there are also caveats. 

ARC’s European Industry Forum
Join us at ARC’s European Industry Forum to speed up your digitalization and sustainability initiatives with strategies and use cases from which technology end users and suppliers will benefit alike. Discover what your peers and industry leaders are doing today and what steps they are taking to prepare for the future. 
For more information about attending, speaking, and sponsoring, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:[email protected]).