Population growth and rising standards of living are driving up the consumption of energy and raw materials. To minimize environmental impact, strategies are needed that ensure the careful and sustainable management of our limited resources. Plant engineers can play an important role in this respect, developing facilities that are considerably more efficient when compared to today's processes. They should focus on the following four requirements high safety, high recycling, higher efficiency and a much higher degree of automation. When looking to develop future supply and production plants, it is important for engineers to properly balance strategies relating to concepts such as smart products, Industry 4.0 and smart products plant engineering. These terms can be described as follows: The smart products strategy includes intelligent, self-monitoring, self-adjusting, user-friendly, resource-saving, energy-saving and communications-capable products: Examples in supply or production plants include the following: a) drives that can be automatically optimized to meet the different operating mode requirements and in the case of damaged fittings will automatically move to their safe positions whilst simultaneously informing other plant sections of the relevant emergency [03], [04]; b) sealing systems that automatically set-up for different operating modes and change the temperature of their matrix advantageously, can be partially self-repairing and can request other aggregates to undergo a controlled plant shut-down in an emergency [07]. and c) fittings that automatically optimize themselves to meet the requirements of the different operating modes and whenever necessary, automatically reducing any leaks that occur through self-repairs [02].
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