Even beyond 2006, the future of automation engineering will continue to be determined to a large extent by the familiar technical trends of recent years. It is remarkable how long it takes, even in such a highly innovative sector as automation engineering, for a discernible technical trend to become the recognized state of the art, and how long that takes to penetrate the entire range of applications.

In my opinion, the main trends that will occupy automation in the near future include:
•Further progress of distributed systems
•Penetration of Ethernet to the field level
•Intelligence of field devices and drives
•New, low-cost sensors
•Wireless communication
•Vertical integration with company-wide networking of processes

For system development and architecture, the issues of integration and standardization, component-oriented automation, embedded operating systems, and Web-based technologies continue to present exciting challenges.

Also of interest are entirely new concepts driven above all by users like the automotive industry, mechanical manufacture, or process engineering. New demands, but also new business opportunities, will arise for automation manufacturers from emerging technologies such as the digital factory, augmented reality and micro process engineering.