Production automation systems

With ever-increasing consumer demand, businesses need to increase their own productivity. Moreover, they have to meet with many difficulties, which include:

• deterioration of product quality;
• optimization costs;
• increased consumption of human resources.

Automation systems provide an opportunity to solve the above problems and find other productivity parameters.

Automation of production is a process in which the control and management functions previously performed by a person are fully transferred to automated units. Automation is often confused with mechanization.

To avoid confusion, it is worth recalling that mechanization is the simplification of human work through the use of automated equipment, and automated production is the use of an automatic control system (ACS) in order to control and regulate the entire technological process.

In other words, automated control systems do not require the presence of a person during operations, as they independently control the stages of work.

Introduction of automated systems into production processes

When talking about the impact of automated manufacturing systems, it is necessary to highlight the following positive points:

1. Lots of high quality items. Automatic control systems make it possible to increase the rate of production of products, while maintaining or improving its quality.
2. The productivity of the enterprise is increasing. Thanks to automation, a quick reorientation of the manufacturing process becomes possible: any equipment can be reprogrammed to produce a different type of product.
3. Saving money. The use of automated control systems makes it possible to reduce several employees, leaving only employees servicing the automation system.
4. High security. Automated control systems do not require human participation during the technological process, and this minimizes the risk of injury to the worker.
5. No errors. Artificial intelligence cannot make mistakes due to inattention or make incorrect calculations.

Numerous developed countries have automated their own production to the maximum. For example, the spread of regulated automated control systems, which are "robots", now has similar indicators.

Of course, automation systems for the production process have become more widespread in those countries where the main field of activity is connected with advanced technologies - an area in which even a small mistake can cause the unusability of all products (microcircuits, processors, motherboards, cars, etc.) .

Although the benefits that production control systems bring, they also have several negative consequences:

1. The need to retrain employees. Any ACS has its own characteristics. If you do not know them, then correct work is simply impossible.
2. Not an easy way to embed. Not all automated equipment can be supported by ACS, and in this case it becomes necessary to upgrade it.
3. The complexity of the fabrication structure is increasing. The use of automated control systems makes a single process control scheme the most difficult.
4. Another unfavorable moment is the problem of a social nature - technological unemployment.

Thanks to automated production systems, the services of a staff of workers are not required. The widespread use of automated control systems contributes to the fact that people have to either change their specialization or look for the least developed institutions.