Celebrating 10 years of Applied Automation

AppliedAutomation celebrates its 10th anniversary and the issues that were relevant in 2006 still hold some weight today.

By Jack Smith June 16, 2016

Debuting in August 2006, AppliedAutomation celebrates its 10-year anniversary with this issue. The first issue contained one feature and one column. Titled "From data to decisions: Turning information into intelligence," the cover story focused on data collection. The column, titled "Enterprise control, batch standards increasing use across multiple industries," was contributed by the International Society of Automation (in 2006, the organization was called the Instrument Society of America). It focused on batch control standards (ISA-88) and enterprise control system integration standards (ISA-95).

In 2006, wireless technologies had created a palpable buzz in the industry—a theme that seemed to be the topic of the year. Secure wireless Ethernet was the Holy Grail of industrial network communications. The automation industry was anticipating consensus of industry professionals who were defining the standards. Companies were competing for industrial wireless dominance while the industry was scrambling to establish a viable standard.

This issue of AppliedAutomation is packed with six features: two articles about flowmeters, an article about control-loop monitoring, one about process historians, another about choosing valve materials, and a case study about PC-based control.

In that first issue, I closed my commentary with: "The world is continually changing; so is manufacturing." Adding to that statement: automation is changing and so is AppliedAutomation—in future issues, more will be revealed about exciting changes to come.

This article appears in the Applied Automation supplement for Control Engineering 
and Plant Engineering

– See other articles from the supplement below.


Author Bio: Content manager, CFE Media