Motion and quality halls, open control architecture and e-manufacturing pavilions, and the usual universe of events and exhibitors will infuse the National Industrial Automation Show and National Manufacturing Week at Chicago's McCormick Place on March 13-16, 2000.

Ladies and gentlemen and engineers of all ages! Before plunging your organization and careers into the competitive tornado of 2000 and beyond, you may want to do little a shopping, pick up some technical expertise, and secure the solutions needed to weather future maelstroms.

Luckily, there's no better place to get outfitted for this newborn millennium than the National Industrial Automation Show (NIAS) and National Manufacturing Week (NMW) 2000. This year's NIAS will consist of more than 250 suppliers and 120,000 ft² of exhibits. Last year's show drew 17,253 engineers and other technical professionals, who represented 21 process and discrete sectors of the $150-billion automation and control market.

Collectively, NMW's four shows are expected to include more than 2,000 exhibitors, 120 sessions in an eight-track conference program, four keynote addresses, New Millennium CEO Panel, IT Town Meeting, NASA Solutions Center, and numerous other events. Last year's event attracted 52,228 attendees, including buying teams from more than 6,000 firms. NMW is sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers (Washington, D.C.) and 38 other associations, organizations, and business and technology publications, including Control Engineering.

To help outfit visitors for the future, NIAS and NMW's three other shows will feature several new and enhanced divisions. Located on the show floors, these will include:

• Motion Hall, which returns to focus on power transmission, motion control, fluid power, motors and drives, and mechatronics. The hall will host the Motion Control Forum featuring 10 motion control executives at 1:30-4 p.m. on Mar. 15. They will discuss technical challenges, such as PC-based control, Internet, SERCOS, SoftMotion, programming languages, linear motors, switched reluctance motors, open architecture, intelligent drives, and autotuning. The hall will open at 9:30 a.m. daily, a half-hour before NMW's other show floors, to give motion buyers a head start;
• Quality Hall, a new venue dedicated to quality assurance and product reliability technologies in manufacturing, will include manufacturers, suppliers, and end-users of test, inspection, measurement, evaluation, and documentation equipment, software, and services;
• Open Architecture Pavilion (OCA), which unites all the fieldbus supplier technologies for networking control components that conform to an open standard. Attendees will learn how to reduce costs with hardware and software products for implementing open fieldbuses. OCA is sponsored by Lutze Inc.;
• E-Manufacturing Pavilion, debuting with a concentration on electronic business application for manufacturing, will highlight e-commerce, database products, procurement, EDI, secure network and management software, extranets, platforms, payment/transaction technology, supply-chain management, application development tools and components, application server software, customer support/customer relationship management, servers, system integration, hardware, software, services, and consulting; and
• Global Manufacturing Solutions Theaterand Design Engineering Technology Theater, two new stages with 45-minute case histories from vendors, which will show visitors how to improve productivity and save time and money.

Other pavilions include: Ceramics, Contract Manufacturing, Energy & Power Management, Expansion & Relocation, Fluid Handling, Lighting, Maintenance Software, Material Handling & Logistics, Rapid Prototyping, Safety/Health/Environmental; and Tools.

To help visitors create customized schedules, NMW's conference program will offer 60-min. sessions beginning at 8 or 9:15 a.m. daily; 90-min. sessions starting at 10:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m. daily, three-hour extended sessions beginning at 1:30 p.m., conference keynotes starting at 12:30 p.m., and specialized trade association courses. Eight tracks in this year's 120-session conference include:

Automation & Control; Design for Manufacturability; Manufacturing Process & Quality; IT in the Enterprise; Management in a Global Economy, Asset Utilization & Facilities Management; and Supply-Chain Management.

In addition, 2^nd annual IT Town Meeting will also be held on March 14. IT executives will show how information technology can help manufacturers achieve greater productivity in this new millennium.

Also, a day before NMW begins, winners of Control Engineering's Editors' Choice Awards will be announced and honored Mar. 12 at an invitation-only reception at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Chicago.