Rise in Demand for Automation across Industries Driving the Distributed Control Systems Market

The growing demand for operational excellence across process industries calls for the need for optimized solutions such as distributed control systems. A distributed control system (DCS) concentrates primarily on operations of large plants, especially which are in power, oil and gas, water treatment, automobile, nuclear power, chemical, and food processing to offer reliability, efficiency, flexibility, quality, simplicity and safety in operations. Such systems are designed to control, monitor and run large and complex industrial processes and regulate information exchange between various components and processes without breakdown.

The DCS market witnesses robust growth in recent years. The rise in demand for industrial automation worldwide, the emergence of open source DCS solutions, and the cost and time effectiveness offered by DCS solutions are providing impetus to the market growth to a great extent. In addition, evolving industrial infrastructure in emerging markets and an increase in inclination toward the public or private cloud are anticipated to offer lucrative opportunities for the market globally. According to Allied Market Research, the distributed control system market is expected to manifest a CAGR of 5.2% during the forecast period, 2016 - 2022.

The oil & gas industry is most likely to dominate the distributed control system market through 2022, owing to a spike in demand for oil, gas, petrochemical, and refined products. On the other hand, the food & beverage industry is anticipated to manifest the fastest CAGR growth during the forecast period because of the emergence of vision inspection systems used for bottling and packaging applications with increased efficiency. Region wise, Asia-Pacific is likely to hold the largest market share for distributed control systems during the forecast period while LAMEA is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR due to the development of traditional industries in the region such as metals, minerals, petrochemicals and chemicals.

The growth of the DCS market is making players focus on increasing productivity and creating high-quality products through technology developments and new product launches to gain a competitive edge. For instance, ABB, a Switzerland-based automation company unveiled the recent version of its distributed control system, ABB Ability System 800xA 6.1.1 in June 2021.

The system is designed to improve collaboration and agility between systems and applications through various new features such as simplified and faster commissioning of greenfield projects and brownfield expansions with enhanced Ethernet I/O Field Kit, with xStream commissioning capabilities. This facilitates greater engineering efficiency, operator performance and asset use. Furthermore, the addition of Select I/O in the new version allows for faster execution of tasks. I/O cabinet standardization alleviates the impact of late changes and keeps the footprint to a minimum. The new version also comes with extra features such as OPC UA connectivity options, which brings about IT/OT convergence.

The OPC UA communication levels are available in a wide range, including OPC UA client and server at the system level. According to Bernhard Eschermann, Head of Technology at ABB’s Industrial Automation division, the xStream commissioning feature eliminates risk and delays from big projects and enables the company’s adaptive execution method for project execution. Standard interfaces allow customers to use operational data in their digitalization journey while taking care of cyber security.

Related Post