Several years ago, Eddie Habibi, founder of PAS, called me up and said he'd developed a new thing, and wanted to know what I thought of it. He called it the "Automation Genome" and wanted to know what I thought of it.
As an idea, a way of visualizing the way plant operations, plant safety and automation systems work and interact, I thought the concept of a DNA-like structure was fascinating and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.
The DNA sequence is made up of a very small number of components yet there are literally millions of combinations of those components in each sequence-- encoding enough information to describe a complete human being. Understanding that is the reason scientists decoded the human genome.
Eddie's idea was that automation and safety systems also consisted of a relatively few component types that were combined in many thousands of ways. Hence, an automation genome.
I continue to think that Eddie's conceptual framework is a useful way of thinking about how plant control and production systems work and are constructed.
At this week's PAS Technical Conference in Houston, Eddie and his team and some of PAS' best customers are discussing various ways to look at the automation genome.
As part of that effort, PAS announced a webinar on the Automation Genome. The webinar is intended to help people in the industry understand what the Automation Genome is, and how it can be used to conceptually organize a plant's control and production systems in an extremely useful and novel way.
I'm going to attend and I think it will be time well spent.
Attend an Introducing the Automation Genome Webinar
Automation systems collectively impact the plant's safety, economic throughput, environmental compliance, and equipment protection. Each system contains a unique and complex collection of tags, programs, databases, and user interfaces that are analogous to the information encoded in the DNA of natural organisms. However, unlike natural organisms, automation genomes evolve daily and the DNA of one automation system often propagates to others through integration. The term Automation GenomeTM describes the collective configurations within and among all automation systems in a plant.
