Industrial production is extending its spectrum to include stronger customization of products, both in discrete manufacturing and in process automation. In the corresponding business model, standard factors such as high volumes or maximum efficiency no longer exist, and time to market (TTM) is a highly sensitive factor affecting profitability. Efficient engineering techniques which enable rapid creation from high level specifications to implementation or enable flexible production can be crucial since they greatly shorten the development time. The goal of this special session is to invite recent research efforts in realizing the dream of “Automation of Automation”, i.e., automating the engineering process for automation systems, in both factory and process automation. Moving towards this direction, one requires close collaboration from researchers in industrial automation (for appropriate semantic models) and in computer science (for efficient algorithms, e.g., graph-database querying, game solving, constraint solving), such that one can create tools that both ease modeling and scale to the industrial usage.
