The automation object is influenced goal-directed by a process control system or a master control system.
It contains all mechanical process-specific devices where an intended technological process, e. g. a production process or a transport process is executed.
Possible input sizes are materials, energy and/or information that are treated within this object in a corrugated way according to one or all possible types of treatment like recovering, transmitting, converting, storing or using. As output variables they leave the automation object in correspondingly modified form.
With regard to the space and lucidity and consequently regarding the rules and standards for reaching and operating the belonging energy and automation equipments there are generally two different classes of industrial automation objects: machines and industrial plants.
Machines: all immobile and mobile processing and converting machines for metals, wood, paper, textiles, materials as well as bottling and packaging machines for solid and liquid products. It is typical for a machine that it has only a few clearly assigned elements of drive and activity that have to be influenced in correspondence with the technological conditions.
With reference to the lucidity machines can be compared to most of the testing devices, e. g. test rigs for electric drive systems, gearboxes or engines, as well as industry robotics and many thermal and chemical aggregates.
Plants: all industrial devices for energy recovery, conversion and distribution like power houses and substations, as well as conveyors, processing and production plants of the raw material industry, the machine systems in the metal-working industry as well as all wide-ranging storage, production and transport systems of the other industry branches.
It is typical for such systems that usually there are many elements, single drives and drive groups as well as a lot of process parameters, which are assigned decentralized and often far away from each other, and which have to be monitored centrally and whose interaction has to be coordinated in correspondence with the process-technological requirements.
