The impact of digitalization on the future of control and operations

The notion of Internet of Things (IoT), as well as related topics such as Cyber-Physical Systems, Industrie 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing are currently attracting a lot of attention within the process and manufacturing industries. Clearly, IoT offers many potential applications for automation, ranging from engineering installation of new plants to production management and more intelligent maintenance schemes including novel sensor technologies. The focus of this paper is, however, on the control and operations. Most likely IoT leads to new system architectures where open standards play a significant role. Through better connectivity, information will be much more easily available, which could result in that previously isolated functions will become more closely integrated. Here modeling at the right level of fidelity will be absolutely key. It can be expected that the importance of optimization will increase and this paper discusses some aspects related to the opportunities, challenges and changes triggered by IoT.