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Automation

The logical ultimate in the evolution of mass production processes is automation. In its ideal form, automation implies elimination of all manual labour and the introduction of automatic controls, assuring accuracy and quality beyond human skills. Perfect automation has never been attained, but sufficient equipment has been installed in many industries to alter greatly the pattern of employment. Tasks formerly performed by machine operators on a production line have come to require only maintenance personnel, engineers, office employees, production-control specialists, and some others. Although automation has been described as a "revolutionary" development, it is actually the end result of the trend of mechanization that began with the Industrial Revolution.

The word automation was coined in the 1940s at the Ford Motor Company and was first applied to the automatic handling of parts in metalworking processes. The concept acquired broader meaning when the American mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote about cybernetics, which he defined as control and communication in the animal and the machine. Wiener anticipated the application of computers to a number of manufacturing situations. His prediction that the introduction of automatic machinery would swiftly give rise to mass unemployment was popularized during the 1950s and '60s, causing considerable alarm. But automation was not introduced as rapidly as foreseen, and other economic factors have intervened to lessen the displacement of labourers.

Automation evolved from three interrelated trends in technology: the development of powered machinery for production operations; the introduction of powered equipment to move materials and workpieces during the manufacturing process; and the perfecting of control systems to regulate production, handling, and distribution.

Devices to move materials from one work station to the next included conveyor-belt systems, monorail trolleys, and various pulley arrangements. The transfer machine, a landmark in progress toward full automation, moves the workpieces to the next work station and accurately positions them for the next machine tool. The first known transfer machine was built by an American firm, the Waltham Watch Company, in 1888; it fed parts to several lathes mounted on a single base. By the mid-20th century, transfer machines were widely employed in the automotive industry, appliance manufacturing, electrical-parts production, and many other metalworking industries, in which they cut labour costs and improved quality by ensuring uniformity and precision.

Automatic controls represented an innovation when applied to all aspects of the production process. The simple cam, automatically adjusting the position of a lever or machine element, was an important control device in many early machines and, during the 19th century, was used to make many machine tools automatic. But cam devices have severe limitations in movement, number of changes, speed, size, and sensitivity. True automatic control cannot be attained unless the machine is sensitive enough to adjust to unpredictably varying conditions. This requirement demands the technique known as feedback, which the microchip computer can perform in a fraction of a second.

Some students of automation maintain that its primary goals are not necessarily increased productivity or cost reduction but product reliability and quality control. Other benefits promised by automation include reduction of waste, improved plant safety, and centralization of control. Still, the most visible initial effects of automation have been reduction of costs and increases in productivity.

Whereas the earlier phase of the Industrial Revolution had resulted in assembly lines mass-producing identical parts for mass markets, the introduction of the computer allowed for custom-made, small-batch production. For example, in the United States the chief investment in plants and equipment in the 1980s went into information technology, such as computers and telecommunications equipment. Such aids have allowed American manufacturers to concentrate on "niche" production--that is, supplying a limited segment of the market with a specialized product and responding speedily to changes in market demand. On the automobile assembly line, niche production enables many cars containing different options demanded by buyers to go down the same assembly line, with the computer making certain that the proper items go into each separate car.

These potentialities of automation have created two new fields: computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), often linked as co-disciplines under the title CAD/CAM. In a sense, CAD/CAM allows the mass production system to manufacture customized, "handmade" articles. The machinery can be adapted to a particular product through computer programming, enabling work on small batches to achieve many of the economies previously available only through mass production of identical objects. Computer-aided design itself makes possible the testing of production methods and the design of the product by running tests (of such factors as ability to withstand stress, for example) through the computer. If necessary, the product design or the process can be modified without going to the expense and time required for building actual prototype models.

Automation not only gives flexibility to production, but it also can cut down costly lead times in changing from one production model to another, and it can control inventories to provide a continuous flow of materials without expensive storage requirements or investment in spare parts. Such efficiencies lower production costs and help explain the growing strength in world markets of the Japanese, who first introduced the practice. Automation has also fostered the development of systems engineering, operations research, and linear programming.

Automation has not yet realized the dream of completely robotized production. The first generation of industrial robots could perform only simple tasks, like welding, for they became confused by slight irregularities or differences in the objects on which they worked. To overcome that difficulty, computer scientists and engineers began developing robots with keener sensitivity, thereby enlarging their capabilities. Although progress has been made, it is clear that human beings must be available to back up the robots and maintain their productivity.

When automation was first introduced, each of the robots involved in complicated processes was controlled by a microcomputer programmed to perform only one task. As these processors could not communicate with one another and lacked memory, it was hard to trace which particular processor was responsible when something went awry. In the late 1980s this deficiency was corrected by the introduction of general-purpose computers, which bring together data from all the microprocessing units and make them accessible on one screen. This sped up the detection of problems and reduced the downtime of machinery, thereby increasing productivity and lowering expenses.