What are you doing to make Industry 4.0 happen? What are your successes? What are your obstacles? What do you need to make Industry 4.0 happen in your organization?
Perhaps the leading obstacle is the name itself -- Industry 4.0. I'll agree that the name isn't inherently revealing. But for the global manufacturing industry today, Industry 4.0 is the top of the mountain;it's shorthand for the fourth generation of manufacturing, which promises to integrate the Internet with information technology and data analytics to spawn highly efficient, cost effective, adaptive and flexible mass production systems.
Industry 4.0 Backgrounder
As a brief backgrounder, Industry 4.0 was the dream child of the German government back in 2011 at the Hannover Trade Fair. The vision of Industry 4.0 was to further boost Germany's already powerful manufacturing industry and prepare it for a new era of high tech manufacturing. It didn't take long for the world to turn onto to the promise of Industry 4.0. Naturally, this technology initiative has inspired the creation and adoption of new technologies. Those technologies are usually described by a variety of names, including the Industrial Internet, Smart Manufacturing, Flexible Manufacturing, Advanced Manufacturing and the Industrial Internet of Things.
Industry 4.0 technology initiatives are expected to progress far beyond the creation of lean production processes. Rather, the supporters of Industry 4.0 hope to meld industrial automation technology, business information, and manufacturing execution architecture in order to mine hidden information from Industry 4.0 devices and systems. Why? The simple answer is to uncover the holy grail of all this new and complex manufacturing technology: information that can drive new developments across a business enterprise that not only forge greater productivity, but also can be the springboard of innovation through creating new products or services for customers -- a benefit that is not currently possible in the current (and third) generation of manufacturing, which focused on automating production by using CNC machines, MRP, CAE/CAD/CAM, robots, etc.
One example of “making” Industry 4.0 happen right now is the Modular Infrastructure Box, designed by Belden and Weidmüller, to work with autonomous production cells. This infrastructure box provides: power, Ethernet networking, standardized cabling, cybersecurity, lightning & surge protection, status information, and data measurement through built-in OPC UA communications. This “plug-and-produce” infrastructure box creates a lifeline through which a manufacturing cell is supplied with everything it requires to perform its function. It facilitates fast data communications, standardized cabling and power and ensuring the safety and security of systems.
Industry 4.0 Implementations
Implementing Industry 4.0 technology doesn’t happen all at once. Implementations generally occur in three stages, depending on business requirements and applications. The first stage gets all the "things" of the factory -- sensors, actuators, machines, motors, process controllers, assembly lines, material handling, testing platforms, etc. -- connected to the Internet.
An example of getting factory "things" connected is the wireless sensor network that Linear Technology built at its Silicon Valley semiconductor wafer facility. Called SmartMesh IP, it is a wireless mesh network used to monitor gas cylinder usage and transmit real-time readings to plant management software. This data aids in capacity planning and enables accurate gas usage estimation, ensuring timely replenishment in order to reduce downtime and wasted gas.
Once all factory devices are Internet-enabled, the second stage commences with a focus on data collection and integration across the business enterprise. This is where Industry 4.0 departs from all the previous generations of manufacturing. Data collected from the factory floor is used to not only communicate and control manufacturing processes, but also is used in other areas of the enterprise to create value-adding products or services.
The final stage centers on innovation. With the Industry 4.0 infrastructure in place – data collected and integrated into the enterprise – it can now be used to realize the true goal of the initiative – operating flexible manufacturing with intelligent machinery that forges an entirely a new kind of factory floor, featuring decentralized control that enables self-optimization, self-configuration and self-diagnosis.
What I've described in the previous paragraph represents nothing less than a seismic shift for the manufacturing industry. But decentralized control makes it possible to add or change-out components as needed, making it easier to meet the growing need for cost-effective, low-volume, mass production customization.
An good example of this is Phoenix Contact's Axioline I/O module production line. The company was being challenged to produce cost-effectively customer orders consisting of an increasing number of different I/O module versions, some of which were ordered in small lot sizes and prototypes of individual components. To solve this problem, Phoenix Contact implemented uniform interfaces and independent control of basic processes on the assembly line. These innovations allowed for several versions of a product to be manufactured in parallel. All of the workstations, assembly machines, and test cells that were needed during a given phase in the manufacturing process were linked to the production system. An expandable work-piece carrier circulation system enabled flexible networking of all possible production resources into one production system. This made it possible to manufacture various I/O versions in a single batch at the same cost it would take to mass-produce them.
How Industry 4.0 Will Change How You Work
Throughout history, technological innovations have always been at the forefront of societal change: how we live and how we work. For example, the introduction of the assembly line by Ransom Olds (which allowed his car manufacturing company to increase output by 500 percent in one year), the conveyor-driven assembly line by Henry Ford (which allowed a Model T to be produced every ninety minutes), and even the first 6-axis assembly robot by Victor Scheinman, fundamentally changed the manufacturing industry. Industry 4.0 promises to revolutionize not only manufacturing operations but also how people work and what work they actually do.
An example of this "work revolution" is the research being conducted at Centrum Industrial IT where researchers are collaborating on solutions for the Factory of the Future. They are working on computer-assisted extension of reality, called Augmented Reality (AR), that is an attempt to more efficiently provide information to a manufacturing worker so he or she can perform a task more efficiently.
AR consists of a high-performance projector used in concert with specialized software to help a worker assemble a part at a manual workstation. The projector illuminates the bin where the worker should take the part to be assembled, and a 3D model shows the worker how to assemble the part.
Are you making Industry 4.0 happen? Tell us about it. What are you doing to implement Industry 4.0 systems? We would like to hear your stories! Please comment below.
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