After the successful conclusion of the PLCnext Community Summit, which took place this year from 30 September to 1 October at the automation specialist Festo in Esslingen, the organisers draw a thoroughly positive conclusion. Phoenix Contact, Festo and Yaskawa had invited to this event. The summit gathered developers, partner companies and technology enthusiasts. In an open and lively atmosphere, around 90 participants came together to make innovations visible, set new impulses for industrial automation and jointly shape the future of open,...

Users today face the challenge of having to integrate different topics such as control and motion, AI, data integration and evaluation, predictive maintenance and much more into their applications at the same time, with short development cycles and ever new requirements. Festo AX Controls presents an automation portfolio that takes these requirements into account. The motto "from the workpiece to the cloud" is taken further here, and Festo AX Controls combines many software modules such as operating system, motion, visualization, high-level...

On the shopfloor, machines not only deliver products, but also large amounts of data that are converted into information using artificial intelligence in such a way that they show humans specific optimization potential . Initial successes are visible: in hundreds of customer applications, solutions from the Festo AX Industrial Intelligence portfolio have reduced unplanned downtimes by up to 25 % and cut waste by 20 %.

Festo is setting new standards in process optimization on the shopfloor: By using AI and other smart software solutions, Festo enables its customers to achieve maximum flexibility and increased efficiency in their production processes. A significant increase in overall system effectiveness has already been demonstrated in many projects. The Festo AX Industrial Apps in particular make digitalization and networking scalable and support the efficient advancement of Industry 4.0 in production.