Industry 4.0 – The Making of the Smart Factory
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
It is the Internet that is driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, just like the previous three revolutions were driven by steam, electricity and IT, respectively.
The term Industry 4.0 (or the German spelling Industrie 4.0) was first used at the 2011 edition of Hannover Messe – a collective term embracing a number of contemporary automation, data exchange and manufacturing technologies, which draws together Cyber-Physical Systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services. But the beginning was made much earlier, when the Technologie-Initiative SmartFactoryKL eV was founded in 2005 in Germany as a non-profit association to establish a network of industrial and research partners to initiate and implement jointly R&D projects ranging from base technologies to the development of marketable products. From the beginning, SmartFactoryKL has had intensive cooperation with the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Started with just 8 founders including BASF, Pepperl+Fuchs and Siemens, among other, today there over 45 partners in the project
By late 2012, the core companies that had collaborated in the project presented a set of Industry 4.0 implementation recommendations to the German federal government, and at the Hannover Messe 2013, the final report of the Working Group Industry 4.0 was presented. The following paragraph from the report explains the concept, capturing the essence:
“Industrie 4.0 holds huge potential. Smart factories allow individual customer requirements to be met and mean that even one-off items can be manufactured profitably. In Industrie 4.0, dynamic business and engineering processes enable last-minute changes to production and deliver the ability to respond flexibly to disruptions and failures on behalf of suppliers, for example. End-to-end transparency is provided over the manufacturing process, facilitating optimised decision-making. Industrie 4.0 will also result in new ways of creating value and novel business models. In particular, it will provide start-ups and small businesses with the opportunity to develop and provide downstream services.”
At Hannover Messe 2016, over 100 examples of real-world implementations of Industry 4.0 were already in use, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. However, there are certain trends in the wake of this latest industrial revolution that are still unfolding and evolving and would be interesting to watch:
-
Robots have already left their safety cages and are working in collaboration with human colleagues and become a key element of the factory of the future
-
Energy efficiency is a big part of Industry 4.0 and the energy systems of tomorrow will comprise of many small, decentralised renewable sources like wind and solar, parts that need to be merged and managed by smart, digital technology; and these can be made safe, secure and efficient thanks to various technologies working in concert
-
New materials would be formed for innovative solutions – lighter materials and composites play an important role in lightweighting of transport and mobility
-
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is just gathering steam and parts on demand is rapidly emerging as an independent business, and
-
Predictive maintenance in the age of Industry 4.0 will move to the next orbit relying on smart sensors that can determine the condition of in-service machines and schedule maintenance as and when required; using the data gathered by these sensors, machine manufacturers can offer maintenance services to factory operators at just the right time, thereby building up their after-sales maintenance business.
According to a recent report by Homeland Security Research Corp (HSRC), an international market and technology research firm, the Industry 4.0 market is projected to reach US $214 Bn by 2023, outweighing the projected 2023 cybersecurity market by 33%. The report is quite comprehensive based on 31 Industry 4.0 round table focus groups with 87 leading industry executives from 17 countries and meta-research based on over 4000 industry respondents in 27 countries and over 2000 companies.
One of the important findings of the report is following three decades of decline in the manufacturing sector of Western and other economies, governments and private companies are adopting technologies of the 4th industrial revolution to resuscitate manufacturing and create R&D and management jobs in their home countries. The 4th Industrial revolution is set to swiftly alter the competitiveness of nearly all industrial sectors across the world, as well as change long-held dynamics in commerce and global economic balance of power.
According to the report, the Industry 4.0 revolution will be driven by an ensemble of emerging technologies, such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Big Data analytics, advanced industrial robots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive maintenance. In the next decades, businesses will establish global networks that incorporate their machinery, warehousing systems, and production facilities in the shape of cyber-physical systems that can be managed in real time. These extremely flexible value networks will require new forms of collaboration between companies, both nationally and globally.
How prepared is the Indian industry for this revolution? The three experts from the Automation domain are optimistic as can be seen from the interviews featured here. Perhaps, what Dr Andreas Wolf, Joint Managing Director, Bosch Ltd, India, wrote in a recent blog sums up the scenario: “The biggest challenge for the implementation of Industry 4.0 in India is neither budget nor technology, or the age of the production lines. It is leadership and qualification. First the managers have to understand it and be able to ask the right questions. The approach is Top down, leaders must drive the revolution. If they don’t know how to use for example open source software, cyber physical systems or cloud solutions, they will never be able to understand the benefit of Industry 4.0 for their organisation.”
It is the Internet that is driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, just like the previous three revolutions were driven by steam, electricity and IT, respectively.
The term Industry 4.0 (or the German spelling Industrie 4.0) was first used at the 2011 edition of Hannover Messe – a collective term embracing a number of contemporary automation, data exchange and manufacturing technologies, which draws together Cyber-Physical Systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services. But the beginning was made much earlier, when the Technologie-Initiative SmartFactoryKL eV was founded in 2005 in Germany as a non-profit association to establish a network of industrial and research partners to initiate and implement jointly R&D projects ranging from base technologies to the development of marketable products. From the beginning, SmartFactoryKL has had intensive cooperation with the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Started with just 8 founders including BASF, Pepperl+Fuchs and Siemens, among other, today there over 45 partners in the project
By late 2012, the core companies that had collaborated in the project presented a set of Industry 4.0 implementation recommendations to the German federal government, and at the Hannover Messe 2013, the final report of the Working Group Industry 4.0 was presented. The following paragraph from the report explains the concept, capturing the essence:
“Industrie 4.0 holds huge potential. Smart factories allow individual customer requirements to be met and mean that even one-off items can be manufactured profitably. In Industrie 4.0, dynamic business and engineering processes enable last-minute changes to production and deliver the ability to respond flexibly to disruptions and failures on behalf of suppliers, for example. End-to-end transparency is provided over the manufacturing process, facilitating optimised decision-making. Industrie 4.0 will also result in new ways of creating value and novel business models. In particular, it will provide start-ups and small businesses with the opportunity to develop and provide downstream services.”
At Hannover Messe 2016, over 100 examples of real-world implementations of Industry 4.0 were already in use, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. However, there are certain trends in the wake of this latest industrial revolution that are still unfolding and evolving and would be interesting to watch:
-
Robots have already left their safety cages and are working in collaboration with human colleagues and become a key element of the factory of the future
-
Energy efficiency is a big part of Industry 4.0 and the energy systems of tomorrow will comprise of many small, decentralised renewable sources like wind and solar, parts that need to be merged and managed by smart, digital technology; and these can be made safe, secure and efficient thanks to various technologies working in concert
-
New materials would be formed for innovative solutions – lighter materials and composites play an important role in lightweighting of transport and mobility
-
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is just gathering steam and parts on demand is rapidly emerging as an independent business, and
-
Predictive maintenance in the age of Industry 4.0 will move to the next orbit relying on smart sensors that can determine the condition of in-service machines and schedule maintenance as and when required; using the data gathered by these sensors, machine manufacturers can offer maintenance services to factory operators at just the right time, thereby building up their after-sales maintenance business.
According to a recent report by Homeland Security Research Corp (HSRC), an international market and technology research firm, the Industry 4.0 market is projected to reach US $214 Bn by 2023, outweighing the projected 2023 cybersecurity market by 33%. The report is quite comprehensive based on 31 Industry 4.0 round table focus groups with 87 leading industry executives from 17 countries and meta-research based on over 4000 industry respondents in 27 countries and over 2000 companies.
One of the important findings of the report is following three decades of decline in the manufacturing sector of Western and other economies, governments and private companies are adopting technologies of the 4th industrial revolution to resuscitate manufacturing and create R&D and management jobs in their home countries. The 4th Industrial revolution is set to swiftly alter the competitiveness of nearly all industrial sectors across the world, as well as change long-held dynamics in commerce and global economic balance of power.
According to the report, the Industry 4.0 revolution will be driven by an ensemble of emerging technologies, such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Big Data analytics, advanced industrial robots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive maintenance. In the next decades, businesses will establish global networks that incorporate their machinery, warehousing systems, and production facilities in the shape of cyber-physical systems that can be managed in real time. These extremely flexible value networks will require new forms of collaboration between companies, both nationally and globally.
How prepared is the Indian industry for this revolution? The three experts from the Automation domain are optimistic as can be seen from the interviews featured here. Perhaps, what Dr Andreas Wolf, Joint Managing Director, Bosch Ltd, India, wrote in a recent blog sums up the scenario: “The biggest challenge for the implementation of Industry 4.0 in India is neither budget nor technology, or the age of the production lines. It is leadership and qualification. First the managers have to understand it and be able to ask the right questions. The approach is Top down, leaders must drive the revolution. If they don’t know how to use for example open source software, cyber physical systems or cloud solutions, they will never be able to understand the benefit of Industry 4.0 for their organisation.”
Hannover Messe
Germany