Yokogawa

Yokogawa Electric is a Japanese industrial-automation and measurement company headquartered in Tokyo, founded in 1915. It is one of the world's major suppliers of distributed control systems, sensors, and the software that runs continuous-process plants in the chemical, oil and gas, and power industries — anchored by its CENTUM VP control system and the broader OpreX automation brand. Yokogawa is best known in AI for a landmark achievement in autonomous control: working with a Japanese research institute, it developed a reinforcement-learning algorithm called Factorial Kernel Dynamic Policy Programming that, in 2022, ran a distillation column at a chemical plant autonomously for thirty-five consecutive days — widely described as the first time an AI directly controlled a chemical plant in place of conventional control. The technology was formally adopted for live operation in 2023, and in 2025 Yokogawa scaled it up at a major gas plant in Saudi Arabia using multiple autonomous control agents. For chemical and process engineers, Yokogawa is the pioneer of AI that doesn't just advise operators but actually runs the plant.