The tragedy is that a good process automation engineer will automate him- or herself out of a job.
Industrial processes are built to run for long periods of times – usually for several decades. Once the process has been robustly automated, the automation engineering task is greatly reduced. As a result, many automation groups in the 1990s and 2000s were reduced in size or even completely closed.
Today, some brown field plants do not even have a process control engineer on site. In these plants, knowledge and expertise has been lost within the organization. The operators know how the process reacts but cannot improve the current control scheme. The consequence is that running the process may become very stressful.
An aggravating circumstance is that process control educators are often electrical engineers or computer scientists by training, not process or chemical engineers. This is problematic because process affinity is needed to improve advanced control and automation solutions.
The loss in knowledge is not irretrievable. But it requires
a) Awareness of the problem described above and
b) Active interventions to capture and/or rebuild existing control structures.
Most importantly, process control and automation cannot be left to electrical or computer engineers alone.
What I’m effectively saying is: Don’t trust me. I am an electrical engineer by training.
*This title was suggested by Karl Astrom at Lund University after I described my view to him. After the encouragement by him I wrote an article with this title which I didn’t know where to publish. I think LinkedIn is probably a better platform for discussion.