Processing power, or people power?
15 Jan 2000
As this month's front cover graphically illustrates, our main theme for this issue is `Computers in Process'. Not that computers are ever absent from other issues, of course, but as a prelude to next month's Computers in Manufacture exhibition, CIM 97, we thought it time to highlight the many innovative applications of computing technologies to the three main areas that involve process engineers - namely, the design, control and management of process plant.
Although many of the topics touched on in the supplement have been the subject of relatively recent articles in PE, the pace of change in the world of computing is so rapid that even reports written for monthly journals can be dated by the time they are published. To put this exponential growth in computer power into sharper perspective, remember that only 30 years or so ago engineering graduates were more proficient with slide-rules than they were with the electronic calculators of the day. The only computers available then were mainframes the size of a garage.
Those same graduates are now, of course, most probably at the peak of their profession and as used to logging on to their desktop PC as are their children (or even grandchildren, if what was said about the '60s is true). Even those that moved into other modes of life - like publishing, for instance - will not have escaped the all-pervasive power of the PC (or, in our case, the somewhat superior style of the Apple Mac).
Control engineers resisted the lure of the PC probably longer than most, but are now embracing Windows NT with all the fervour of converts to the true faith. Their god is not in the heavens, however. He lives in Seattle from where his acolytes spread the Word... and most of the other de facto industry-standard applications that are seamlessly linking design, control and management.
Fortunately, engineers in general regard computers as merely tools of their trade - and not the long lost saviour to all their companies' ills that some in the IT world would have them believe. To some extent, that eminently sensible, if conservative, view has slowed the spread of management `IT solutions' through the process industries. But again, that is changing rapidly, as the organisers of CIM 97 have recognised with the introduction of a special process `show within a show'.
