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Automation is a fairly general term, and it's used in many contexts. But it basically means the ability to make some sequence of things happen without having to invoke them one at a time. A very common example can be found in most homes, in the form of the learning remote control. These devices can learn in the commands of other remotes, and then play back some number of those commands at the press of a single button. In this case, you have automated that sequence of commands so that you can invoke them as a whole, not one at a time.
At the most fundamental level, automation systems exist to provide this same capability. You want to be able to power on the whole home theater with one button, or turn off all of the lights in areas of the home where the security system is armed, or run the sprinklers every other day if it's not raining, and so forth. All of these things require that some sequence of events occur in an automated way.
A product like CQC is far more powerful than a learning remote, which you'll learn as you get deeper into the details. But fundamentally, you can think of it as a learning remote on lots and lots of steroids. No matter how fancy it gets, at its core it is about coordinating sequences of individual actions that you want to treat as a single action from the point of view of the family member pressing the button.
The Control part of Control and Automation is more straightforward. It just means that CQC can interact with the devices in your home and ask them to do things, and get information from them. Without control, it would be impossible to do automation. But the control that CQC has is (usually) considerably more powerful than the type of control that a remote control has. Remote controls have no idea if the commands that they send out are working or not. If one of the steps fails, they will just continue blithely along, potentially causing an undesirable sequence of events. The sort of control that control and automation systems have is generally more positive, meaning that they talk to the device and it talks back, saying things like, "OK, I heard that request and I've done that successfully" or "Sorry, I couldn't do what you asked." This allows automation systems to know when a sequence of events has gone awry and it can stop before something potentially bad happens. If a device can only be controlled by remote control, CQC can still control them as well, it's just not able to provide that positive type of control that is optimal.