Abstract

As the industry continues to pursue the reduction of downtimes and increases in the efficiency of resource usage, data appears as a valuable business asset, empowering intelligent automation solutions. In order to deal with current challenges in acquisition and management of data in industrial settings, this paper proposes a framework for intelligent automation. The traditional automation pyramid does not cope with today’s application requirements, as intelligent automation needs to exchange, in real-time, information with all layers of the pyramid, simultaneously. The middleware for intelligent automation provides interoperability through integration software along with cloud functionalities and big data warehousing. The middleware also provides decentralization by connecting to remote decision support systems. This paper presents two real implementation examples of the framework in the wood and the chemical industry. The framework successfully addresses the requirements of key intelligent automation features and data characteristics, supporting the development of support decision systems into automation modules.