Here you will learn about various working levels of Industrial Automation. It is necessary to understand various levels of Industrial Automation. There are so many hardware devices, software, IT infrastructure, and networking involved; that it is a must to co-relate things between them and understand what the difference between them is.
1. Field Level
It is the lowest level of the Automation Hierarchy, which includes the field devices like sensors and Actuators. It Contains AC/DC Motors, relays, Valves, Sensors, Barcodes, etc.
The main task of these field devices is to transfer the data of processes and machines to the next Higher level for monitoring and analysis.
2. Control Level
This level consists of various Automatic devices, like CNC machines, PLC, Robots, etc which take the process parameters from the various sensors & perform the control technique.
3. Supervision & Production Control Level
In this level, Automatic devices are monitored and controlled by HMI (Human Machine Interface). In this level various functions are Carried out like supervising various parameters, setting production targets , setting of machines like start or shutdown etc.
In this level Mostly DCS (Distributed Control System) or SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) are popularly used.
4. Information & Enterprise Level
This is the top level of Industrial Automation, which manages the whole Automation system. The task of this level includes Production Planning, Customer and Market Analysis, Orders and Sales, etc.