Industry 4.0 / IIoT

Digital transformation of energy management and automation provider, Schneider Electric, has had its Le Vaudreuil factory in France selected among the world’s top nine advanced ‘lighthouse’ site that embed the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution into modern production at the World Economic Forum’s 12th Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China.

HANNOVER MESSE is driving forward the digital transformation of the production and energy industries. Every year marks the next step into the future. For 2019, the guiding theme is 'Integrated Industry – Industrial Intelligence,' which spotlights digital networking between humans and machines in the age of artificial intelligence.

Through its new cloud-based solution for pro-active maintenance based on the AI platform within IBM Watson Mitsubishi enables smart analysis of operational data to predict and highlight future maintenance requirements. The theory is that sometimes service schedule requirements for robots are inadvertently missed which, despite the extended duty-cycles and the general reliability of modern robots, is not a healthy situation for continuous plant operation.

For the first time at the Process and Packaging Machining Association Show, Comau (Stand F110) will showcase new products and walk visitors through real life factories of the future by creating a 360° virtual tour of the digital production and collaborative robotic applications the industrial automation solutions provider has deployed across Europe.

In the age of the fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, digital technologies are linking the physical and digital worlds, helping to create a new future of connectivity for manufacturers. Manufacturers can take advantage of this new era of connectivity, which promises to deliver greater productivity, improved utilisation of assets and enhanced decision-making, by linking their operations data with smart manufacturing technologies.

By offering third-party-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based products and solutions, industrial automation vendors have evolved to provide proprietary digital platforms via the Product-as-a-Service (PaaS) business model. The trend of digitalisation in end-user industries prompted automation vendors to invest in IIoT technologies across diverse applications.

  It has been announced that Deutsche Messe Technology Academy, Hanover and Phoenix Contact, Blomberg, have agreed on actively cooperating on employee qualification. Their aim is to teach the necessary skills and knowledge for the digital transformation. 

  At SPS/IPC/Drives Italia 2018, Mitsubishi Electric highlighted why gigabit CC-Link IE is a future proof technology for open networking in industrial automation. The company backed this up by showing an extensive range of products with CC-Link IE connectivity.

Metrology is of fundamental importance to future factories because so much factory efficiency relies on accurate data. A process or product cannot be improved unless it can be measured accurately. Metrology, the science and processes of measurement, captures data about both tooling and components to allow new manufacturing processes – such as additive manufacturing and robot-operated machining – to be tested and perfected.

Sophisticated robots, drones, and automobiles on display at places like the world-famous Consumer Electronics Show (CES) are consumer playthings that, thus far, have won most of the media attention surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) movement.