The concept of industrial autonomy as the next evolutionary step beyond mere automation for the process industries continues to gather momentum among leading suppliers of process automation platforms, as Honeywell’s new “journey to autonomous” vision joins Yokogawa’s Industrial Automation to Industrial Autonomy (IA2IA) roadmap for the future.

But there’s been considerable discussion the past couple of years about how the autonomous vehicle concepts we’ve all become familiar with in the context of self-driving cars translate to the operation of a process plant. For instance, how do we even classify the transitions from automated to "intelligently" automated (augmented with artificial intelligence and machine learning) and ultimately to autonomous operations?

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