Executive Views of Open Automation - Panel Discussion - ARC Forum 2025

Описание: This session will feature leaders from two companies that have been at the forefront of the revolution in industrial automation: ExxonMobil and Audi. Whit McConnell is Chief Engineer, Automation & Process Control at ExxonMobil. In this role he is responsible for setting the direction of process automation throughout ExxonMobil, and Whit will speak at this session to explain ExxonMobil’s future automation plans and to answer our questions.

On the discrete manufacturing side, the one company has pushed the envelope of automation technology far more than any other is the automotive manufacturer Audi. In its largest plants Audi deploys thousands and thousands of IPCs, PLCs, robots, and other automation devices. Many of these require local service and some of which are not even networked. Their ever-expanding requirements for software upgrades, cyber security protection, and application enhancement all had to be performed during non production hours and this was becoming simply impossible.

Henning Löser is Senior Manager of the Audi Production Lab. In this role Henning leads a team that develops new technologies for deployment in Audi production plants. With its supplier partners Audi has pioneered the technology of control and HMI virtualization and containerization and invested in this technology at an early stage when most industry folks believed it was either impractical or impossible. Henning will share the stage with Witt McConnell and will explain Audi’s experience and their future direction in automation. He’ll also answer our questions.

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