Advances: Digitalisation in the Process Industries

Co-chair Zaid Rawi looks back on October’s Advances, IChemE’s biennial conference for engineering and process industry professionals

WITH a technical committee drawn from the IChemE DigiCom community and other IChemE special interest groups, it was a pleasure to co-chair this successful and engaging event with Bhavik Mehta of Siemens.

Advances brings together expertise from multiple industries and academia, including process automation, modelling and simulation and related fields. More than 100 delegates working in digitalisation, process automation, control, process engineering, safety, cybersecurity and information management – alongside nine sponsors and exhibitors – joined us in Manchester, UK, from around the world, contributing to an excellent event.

The conference featured a strong plenary lineup and 26 technical presentations delivered across parallel streams and workshops, supported by lively audience discussion. Every session focused on innovation, best practice and emerging technologies in industrial digitalisation.

Plenary highlights included a presentation from Costas Pantelides on hybrid modelling approaches to advance toward autonomous control, followed by Sarat Kumar Reddy Molakaseema, who explored universal “plug-and-produce” automation software concepts. Valentijn de Leeuw discussed the human factors involved in digital transformation, including listening, work design and coaching, while Daniel Simkiss shared insights into real GenAI deployment for operations at British Sugar.