Automation Infrastructure

Geoigakopoulos, D., Homick, M., and Sheth, A. (1995), An Overview of Workflow Management From Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Vol. B, No. 2, pp. 119-153. 

Human factors study the relation between humans and automation. The contents and format of the supphed information has to meet certain standards to enable the personnel to perform their control and supervisory tasks well. This may conflict with the hierarchical structure of the control functions, which will be based on the partitioning of equipment operations. For the most part, flexibility of the automation infrastructure can solve these conflicts. In addition the degree of automation along the control hierarchy should be chosen with care. 

Profitability Excellent knowledge infrastructure, automation, low cost... 

Advances in information technology and the necessity of improved efficiency have resulted in increasingly automated and interlinked infrastructures, and have created new vulnerabilities due to equipment failure, human error, weather and other natural... 

While utilizing the HTS expertise and capacity might deliver the initial desired results, we recommend that serious considerations are given to the transfer of expertise and build up of a local automation and support infrastructure that is specific to the needs of ADME/Tox testing in order to understand crucial process steps, vhen a rapid scale up is required. 

The Good Automated Manufacturing Practices (GAMP) Forum has developed guidelines for computer validation [5] and a draft guidance on quality assurance of information technology (IT) infrastructure [6]. 

Automation users would like to apply the CII for automating functions that are crucial for them and for society (this is intrinsic to the definition of critical infrastructure ). The functions can be related for example to supply chains, production or financial operations. The positive side is given by the possibility to conduct fast and efficient reactions to unwanted conditions (e.g., unsafe states, security breaches). However this exposes those critical functions to the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of the CII - which can neither ensure the availability of the connection, nor the secure treatment of the data. 

But it would seem that, particularly when one has to allow for malicious attacks by intelligent adversaries on a system s or an infrastructure s protective structuring, there are at least in principle some fundamental limitations as to what can be achieved solely by automated defenses—... 

HTS has evolved into an industrialized process in which hundreds of thousands to a million compounds can be screened in an automated fashion with the goal to identify novel entry points into drug discovery programs. A sophisticated HTS informatics infrastructure is required to manage the operational aspects of an HTS campaign and process the large data sets generated. 

The reasons why natural products have not been an area of focus for pesticide company discovery efforts are several. They include the relatively high cost of bioassay-directed isolation, the probability of rediscovery, and the often prohibitively complex structure of the active molecule. Furthermore, the strategies for discovery of natural product-based pesticide discovery are different from those for synthetic compounds, requiring a somewhat different laboratory infrastructure. New methods, including semi-automated bioassays, automated chemical extraction and analysis, and molecular biology methods to... 

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