Shifting toward vendor-agnostic systems
The automation controls industry is moving further from proprietary silos and closer to more flexible architectures. This transition is more than just an upgrade and requires control system design to be handled in a fundamentally different way.
"The challenges surrounding this transition stem from the historical development of control system technologies," Outlier Automation's Liz Brooks-Zak wrote for Automation World. "As industrial technologies were developing, vendors had to define their own protocols and communication methods. A company looking for automation solutions would select a single vendor and typically remain within the technological boundary of the vendor’s product portfolio."
Open standards and modular architectures form the foundation of
Vendor-agnostic systems are founded on open standards and modular architectures, relying on communication protocols like OPC UA and MQTT, as well as JSON/XML data formats.
