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Modular Process Automation

Faster construction and modification of process systems: Do you want to respond quickly and flexibly at any time to current market demands to increase your competitiveness? The solution is DIMA – Decentralized Intelligence for Modular Applications. WAGO presented DIMA, an approach that can revolutionize process plant engineering, at the NAMUR General Meeting in 2014.

Advantages of the modular system concept:

Shortened conception phase
Shortened system construction times
Quick commissioning
Flexible adaptation of module capacities to market conditions

Stay Ahead with Adaptable Systems

Only with modular systems can the process industry react quickly enough to continually changing market requirements.

Requirements: Adaptable Production

Over the past decades, the market requirements posed to process industry production have fundamentally changed: Together with the increasing demand for customer-oriented product specialization, fluctuating procurement and sales markets result in ever shorter product life and innovation cycles; this is also – or especially – the case with chemical products. Today's production systems can only meet these demands with difficulty: A change in production volume generally confronts conventional systems with a loss in production efficiency.

Accordingly, new products are usually only launched for reliable markets, while new and promising technologies are only applied with considerable delay. Moreover, especially in the future environment set by Industry 4.0, it is expected that the trends of globalization and individualization will continue to peak – and with them, the demands on production process flexibility. This means it is even more important to toughen up production systems today, by making systems and machines flexibly adaptable.

Solution: Modular System Engineering

Modular system engineering has been one key to increased production flexibility for several years now. The idea: An entire system consists of several autarkic modules. In this framework, one system module comprises one or more standardized production steps and can be combined with other modules to form a complete process. This is done by connecting all modules involved to a backbone. This backbone supplies the modules with both material and information.

Changing the production process is then a matter of simply exchanging one or more modules. Production volume can be increased through numbering up; that is, adding additional modules of the same type (Figure 1). Only with adaptable, modular systems can the process industry react quickly enough to continually changing market requirements. But at present, the technical automation solutions necessary to consistently implement modular system engineering have been lacking. WAGO presented DIMA, an approach that can revolutionize process plant engineering, at the NAMUR General Meeting in 2014.

From WAGO for All

DIMA links modular structures and Industry 4.0 approaches into a winning value-added process over the entire lifecycle of a facility.

WAGO at Work

More about Modular Process Automation

The role modular system concepts play in modern process technology is becoming more and more important. We have prepared the related topics and solutions for you.