IT asset management of industrial automation systems

The installation and administration of large heterogeneous IT infrastructures, for enterprises as well as industrial automation systems, are becoming more and more complex and time consuming. Industrial automation systems, such as those delivered by ABB Inc., present an additional challenge, in that these control and supervise mission critical production sites. Nevertheless, it is common practice to manually install and maintain industrial networks and the process control software running on them, which can be both expensive and error prone. In order to address these challenges, we believe that in the long term such systems must behave autonomously. As preliminary steps to the realization of this vision, automated IT asset management tools and practices will be highlighted in this contribution. We will point out the advantages of combining process control and network management in the domain of industrial automation technology. Furthermore we will propose a new component model for autonomic network management applied to industrial automation systems.