Automation networks of today are getting bigger and more complex and put a significant burden on the personnel in charge of the systems. Initialization, configuration and reconfigurations are challenging and sometimes very time consuming. Thus there is a need to look for more elegant solutions to handle these tasks. Today, there is much focus on how distributed units can work together to carry out a common task and this perspective can be easily transferred to automation networks containing a multitude of embedded devices each involved in different ways in an application. This paper looks into challenges related to significantly increased degree of autonomy in automation systems, i.e. how these systems can configure themselves automatically and how they can adapt to changed situations.
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