Future Trends in Process Automation

I have spent many years designing and building control systems for process plants, the last ten of them integrating Ethernet, and recommending to my clients that they avoid linking their plants to the internet. Process plants are, or should be, built with the philosophy of "what will be the consequences if?". When the answer to that question is dangerous or expensive then you guard against it ever happening. We predicted nine years before the first reported case that highly computerized plants would be vulnerable to hacking. The computer software industry releases products on the basis that if a bug is in the program we will apply a patch and release an update. A large portion of internet software is written in Java, a programming language with so many holes in it that you could metaphorically use it to sieve boulders. That mentality does not sit well with engineers in the chemical, petrochemical and food industries where bugs in the system kill people. The "internet of things" is not currently robust enough to apply to process industries. Until that changes, I will continue to shout loudly against deploying it in this sector. I don't see that happening until the programming languages used to write internet software change.

Well said... coming from a food processing background, I agree fully and completely.