Depending on your point of view, year 2000 brings images of computer-based chaos, futuristic societies, benevolent advancement of humanity, or the apocalypse.

More than likely, despite a few computer-related glitches, year 2000 provides a launching pad for the potential of human imagination. Much of Control Engineering coverage in the past few years has focused on issues critical to automation and controls well into the next millennium. Related topics in this issue include Y2K remediation efforts (second cover story), optimization efforts, and control terminology in "Back to Basics."

Among key trends over the next 10 years:

• Continued shift to commercial technologies—such as PC-based hardware, software, and networks—leverages economies of scale and allows automation and controls vendors to add value in specific areas of expertise (Also seeControl Engineering Online extra: "Machine Control Past Year 2000'' by Gary Mintchell, senior editor, at www.controleng.com);
• Increased focus on advancing core competencies through partnerships gives customers options of one-stop shopping with pre-integrated systems, or going with an industry-specific integrator to combine best-of-breed applications;
• Human-factors engineering, in efforts to improve relations between people and their tools, are pushing human-machine interfaces into three major categories—larger, cheaper flat-panels; wearable "glasses-like" head-gear for mobil interaction; and smaller, distributed web-based displays;
• Integration of plants, processes, alarming, and maintenance promotes asset management; unplanned downtime nears extinction;
• Smaller, faster, cheaper, and better product development goes on, but emphasis continues to move toward solving problems, and away from the latest, greatest widget;
• More modular software use objects for quick and easy upgrades; major upgrades to middleware and operating systems become more seamless, preserving existing data, preferences, settings, and other intellectual investments;
• Optimization and advanced control tools become widespread;
• Internet technologies increase communication and connectivity of automation and controls, and enable electronic commerce; and
• Manufacturing execution systems (and successors) facilitate seamless linking of business and control systems.

In the next few years, 15-in. flat-panel human-machine interfaces will look as small as 10-in. screens do now; 18-in. screens will become common, and 20-in. screens will see greater demand. "Lower-cost flat-panels will make the CRT obsolete on the plant floor in the next five years," says Daniel Benson, vice president, Ann Arbor Technologies (Ann Arbor, Mich.) Proliferation of factory-floor networks including wireless installations, Inter/intranets, thirst for digital data, and usefulness of video will be additional drivers pushing the move to inherently digital flat-panel technologies, he adds.

Eye-mounted computing has begun with Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions' (Phoenix, Ariz.) Golden Eye—used to significantly speed process startup with its mobility.

Internet-based advancements continue. Schneider Automation (North Andover, Mass.) announced Nov. 23, 1998, that its web-based Transparent Factory "open automation framework" is built on the Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications (DNA) architecture. DNA is based on Ethernet, TCP/IP networking protocol and common Microsoft-based technologies such as the COM-based (common object model) OPC (OLE for Process Control) standard. Such advancements allow seamless linking of legacy and newer systems within a Windows environment, explains Schneider Automation's Mark Fondl, vp marketing.

Many automation and control system software modules and packages have taken on functionality of manufacturing execution systems software. Many also have linked to business systems to streamline information flow from the process to the business and back again. One example is Sequencia Corp. (Phoenix, Ariz.) and SAP (Walldorf, Germany), which announced on Dec. 1, 1998, a unique "transparent, bi-directional patch for a production order between SAP and the plant-floor control system." (See more, www.controleng.com.) Improving connections will eventually maker layers invisible.

Developments possible and practical in 10-20 years include the following:

• Disappearance of computers as we know them; embedded intelligence integrates completely into daily life, and in manufacturing;
• Motor and drive miniaturization put motion technologies and microelectromechanical systems into many unlikely places;
• "Paper" becomes a reusable human-machine interface, able to receive transmissions and update its ink-based semiconductors, regaining a foothold as a portable, changeable, video-capable media. MIT Media Labs, Cambridge, Mass., www.mit.edu/research, is developing such an electronic paper;
• Software recommends its own improvements, searching global networks for the most-optimal combination of object-based upgrades to maximize process efficiencies. Richard Morley—inventor of the PLC, www.barn.org in Nashua, N.H.—envisions software objects becoming free to users, with code-writers taking commissions from web-page owners based on the number of site visitors the software brings; and
• Manufacturers figure ways to use automation to minimize environmental impacts and realize sustainable economic growth.

Stated visions among automation and controls companies and their customers for the early years of the next millenium are markedly similar. Watch each 1999 edition of Control Engineering to see how early visions match reality.