How the Industry 4.0 concept is now being taken on board as a methodology to foster advanced manufacturing processes for intelligent flexible production on demand
The German acronym ‘Industry 4.0’ stands for a concept aiming at extending the real-time communication between objects in manufacturing control and material flow – in essence, M2M communication. That means that also the intra- and cross-company supply chains are included. According to some pundits, who say since German industry takes a globally leading position in performing this real-time networking, Industry 4.0 is also a type of ‘master plan’ for the federal economic and research politics.
The term ‘industry 4.0’ refers to the fourth industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was the mechanization of production using water and steam power, it was followed by the second industrial revolution which introduced mass production with the help of electric power, followed by the digital revolution, the use of electronics and IT to further automate production.
In order to make the real-time M2M communication possible, automatic identification needs to be applied in appropriate ways. When ‘things’ want to communicate with each other then they need to identify their communication partners in a secure way. With regard to this, Industry 4.0 is an implementation of the Internet of Things. Technologies like barcode, RFID and RTLS are deployed and are complemented by sensors, which capture automatically the surrounding conditions and provide this data for future use.
Two recent global industry events, reflecting the concept of the use of electronics and IT to further automate production, saw Industry 4.0 attain high relevance in conference discussions.
Productronica 2013: 20th international trade fair for innovative electronics production
The ‘CEO Round Table’ on the opening day of Productronica saw a blend of vision and of motivation, giving an opportunity to elevate collective efforts looking into the next decades. Driving the debate was a vision to streamline the individual contribution of every player big and small into a common framework that aims to ensure we remain competitive as an industry.
Industry 4.0 was seen by and large as building on the legacy of concepts from previous years, in the light of the electronics industry’s pursuit new avenues of growth in the era of globalization, digitalization and ubiquitous intelligence.
Some of the points raised for debate saw claims that ‘Industry 4.0’ will be one, if not the most, relevant and impactful consequence of the upcoming proliferation of the ‘Internet of Things’. Advanced semiconductor technology would be a key enabler to guarantee the required levels of security, power, robust, long range & fast RF communications, cost and production flows.
It was also stated that factories need to adopt a much more agile approach to how they work, while the context of Industry 4.0 for electronics assembly, intelligence, in the form of a live factory management system, was presented as a key to reducing variation and make it more manageable. Furthermore, PCB based electronics manufacturing as a very complex form of manufacturing, requires a factory intelligence to work productively and be commercially successful, while a removal of the existing barriers to agility is required.
Additionally in order to understand the scope and reach of Industry 4.0, panelists looked back to the early days of the modern production industry when machines were specialized for single simple actions, segregated and needed an interface to facilitate workflow. As such, mechanical connections, simple electric signals, serial communication lines, field buses of first and second (Ethernet) generation appeared. With complexity came a need for protocols – and there were many of them, such as Ethernet – a network to connect computer machines, according to the participants.
It was concluded that the means of future technology interaction will take place at the center of the most common computing and communication platform in the industry. While Industry 4.0 proposes to create machines that can share what to do and are capable to communicate and even understand freely, some panelists theorized that in this new world, any combination of manufacturing could be created automatically with little work, facilitating the batch production at the low cost of highest volume production, getting rid of the laborious engineering work for manufacturing line integration.
ID WORLD International Congress: The 12th World Summit on Identification
At this event, held in Frankfurt, the Industry 4.0 panel held to the overall theme of striving towards intelligent flexible production on demand.
With regard to this, Industry 4.0 was presented as an implementation of the Internet of Things. For automatic identification, technologies like barcode, RFID and RTLS were highlighted complemented by sensors which capture automatically the surrounding conditions and provide this data for future use. A conceptual overview about Industry 4.0 was avidly debated in terms of Federal government support, global adoption of the concept and an additional concept of Worker 4.0, allowing for ergonomics in an M2M environment to be able to adjust to humans’ personal space, in terms of operational requirements as well as health and safety.
In addition optimizing secondary business processes were discussed regarding security and quality in production plants, information and communication management today and in the era of Industry 4.0. Further discussion centered around cloud computing, EMS and mobility with questions being asked about where was the ‘State of Technology’ when looking at upcoming requirements from the worldwide internet enabled industry. What has to be done to use the identification technologies such as barcode, RFID or sensor technology when talking about the new generation of manufacturing? It was presented that autoID devices were made to be the perfect members of the new independent Industry 4.0 world.
Self-routing, to be connected every time from everywhere, plus powerful embedded intelligence to execute complex operations locally on request of the central based manufacturing system, was to some protagonists, the future.