In today’s competitive global environment, manufacturers are increasingly seeking ways to build high-quality personalised products, in short time scales and at the lowest possible cost. In this context, future factories are driven by the need to realise a shift from the traditional capability to produce goods at large quantities to flexibility in meeting variable market demands, while at the same time exploiting the trends of modular products and proximity sourcing.
There is a clear trend towards supporting new production models which attempt to produce what the customer wants. Simultaneously, the customer orders the products (just-in-time), instead of maintaining excessive stock and allocating effort in the usually complex task of efficient management. In manufacturing terms, the trend is increasingly to produce goods according to make-to-order (MTO), configure-to-order (CTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) models, rather than based on the conventional made-to-stock (MTS) paradigm.
To meet these requirements, manufacturers are increasingly resorting to future ICT technologies in order to effectively manage information about the factory and the manufacturing chain (e.g., orders, shipments, suppliers). In this direction, the representation of physical world processes and entities (e.g., machines, tools, electronic systems, industrial automation systems) as cyber assets enables the management of manufacturing processes based on digital technologies. This is the essence of the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), which foresees that manufacturing systems will be managed as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) that will bridge and synchronize the physical world with the cyber world.
Industrie 4.0 – A Primer
Industrie 4.0 has been inspired and initiated in Germany, but is spreading around the globe since manufacturers are increasingly treating their factories as large scale interconnected CPS systems. CPS systems and technologies are almost synonymous with the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, since they both enable the interconnection and synchronization of digital assets with physical world entities and phenomena. The majority of researchers and engineers use the two terms interchangeably, choosing one or the other based on their background and application domain. In practice, it’s very common to characterise as CPS systems the class of IoT systems that involve real time interactions, actuation and control. As a result, IoT is one of the underlying technologies for the fourth industrial revolution.
In IoT all systems and stakeholders in the manufacturing chain remain constantly connected and can seamlessly exchange information about orders, shipments, materials, finished goods and more. Outside the factory, customers and sales-force interactions can be rapidly conveyed to orders and manufacturing requirements within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems, in order to facilitate planning of materials sourcing, materials management and production scheduling.
Likewise, within the factory, IoT can enable more distributed and flexible automation processes, through accelerating the addition and reconfiguration of production lines in response to triggers within the factory (e.g., machine failures, production quality issues) or even from the supply chain (e.g., delayed delivery of source materials, requests for new customized products). Furthermore, IoT can greatly facilitate the rapid integration of new technology ranging from RFID tags to identify objects and people in the shopfloor, to 3D printers which could accelerate the production of specific parts of a product. This flexibility in integrating the so-called additive manufacturing technologies (i.e. 3D printing) is a direct result of the ability to deal with the soft digital representation of physical systems, rather than with the physical devices themselves.
IoT technologies in the factory and the manufacturing chain will be deployed in conjunction with other emerging internet-based technologies, such as Cloud computing, edge computing and Big Data. For example, the Cloud provides the means for seamless and unified data exchanges across different enterprise applications in the supply chain. In this way, the manufacturers’ ERPs can be rapidly updated with information from other stakeholders’ ERPs about orders, shipments, materials flows and more. As another example edge computing systems can be deployed inside the factory in order to enable fast local-level actuation over machines and electronic devices. Likewise, data analytics are deployed at both edge[1] and the Cloud points in order to enable the identification of important events such as the need to run maintenance processes or to reconfigure the production process. The deployment of IoT, Big Data and Cloud technologies in the factory is performed in a secure and trustful way, as hacking of any of the digital systems or interactions could have a disastrous impact on production.
Despite these advances the Industrie 4.0 revolution is still in its early stages. This is no surprise given that the manufacturing sector is always a bit more conservative in the adoption of new technologies when compared to other sectors of the economy such as financial services and ICT. Manufacturers’ reluctance is probably higher when it comes to adoption of digital (“soft”) technologies. Hence, while the adoption of CPS manufacturing increases, most manufacturers are still looking for tangible evidence that digital technologies can indeed help improving production time, quality and cost at the same time.
Others are also asking for a smooth migration path from the current state, as most factories have been heavily investing in their existing systems. Standardisation is a key for increasing adoption, along with a proliferation of successful deployments and best practice paradigms. In this direction, we are recently witnessing the emergence of a batch of relevant technical standards from the industrial internet consortium[2], as well as the rise of reference architecture models for Industrie 4.0[3].
The fourth industrial revolution is here to stay and provide new production models and opportunities for both manufacturers and their customers. It is closely affiliated to IoT, being actually one of the settings where immediate growth of IoT investments will be observed. IoT will be therefore a game changer for future manufacturing, much in the same way it contributes to paradigm shifts in smart cities, healthcare[4] and other application domains.
[1] http://theinternetofallthings.com/what-iot-edge-analysis-all-about-09162016/
[2] https://www.iiconsortium.org/
[3] The Reference Architectural Model RAMI 4.0
[4] http://theinternetofallthings.com/transforming-healthcare-through-wearables-and-iot-whats-the-big-deal-about-it-03102016/
John Soldatos is an Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, JavaEE conultant, writer and published author.
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