Industry 4.0

Digitise or be left in the dust? This is the pivotal question facing today's factories, logistics centres and power stations. Industry 4.0 is fast becoming the new standard, and that means change. IT and machinery manufacturing are converging, new business models are popping up like mushrooms, and AI is making its way into factories. And everything revolves around one central element: people power.

Creating new communication requirements between machines (machine to x) and IT infrastructure is the continuous innovation and data-driven business models in Industry 4.0. To ensure interoperability and communication, Assystem Technologies has initiated a one-of-a-kind standardisation project, providing a ‘Reference Model for Industrial Cloud Federation’.

The drive for increased efficiency is essential in every area of the water industry, completely integrated solutions that offer improvements to operational insight, energy usage, physical supply networks and process installations of especially high importance. At the IFAT 2018 exhibition, Mitsubishi Electric will be presenting its approach to meeting these needs, which has been developed based on an understanding of industry requirements from water automation projects from around the world.

In this new era of production techniques and technologies, new buzzwords are being circulated throughout the internet. ‘Lean’ is a relatively new model for managing businesses, especially in fields like manufacturing, software development and construction. Basically, anywhere where massive workloads are involved and effective distribution of them is necessary within a tight accommodation of budget and resources.

Analog Devices will be participating in the 2018 Hannover Messe Fair, and highlights will include the company’s first demonstration in Europe of the precision RADAR sensing technology it obtained with its recent acquisition of Symeo, and the application of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to vibration analysis and machine health monitoring.

Detecting objects in systems is such an important part of the automation industry. Objects have to be reliably detected and measured, as well as verifying that they are correctly positioned. The scope of possible applications is almost limitless and is continuously expanding (for example, detecting valve and flap positions, the position of PV panels for optimal exposure to light, the position of a ship's rudder, and automation tasks in the machine-tool industry.)

  Joining the journey towards Industry 4.0, businesses will start to see progress and it is a necessity to be able to share large volumes of data across growing numbers of devices, in real time. This can only be done if there is sufficient network bandwidth available.

New forms of work and collaboration come from digitalisation, while at the same time it confronts the industry with a new set of challenges. As the need for a technically qualified workforce goes up, the number of qualified workers continues to go down. The HANNOVER MESSE supporting program titled ‘Career 4.0’ explores the different requirements and opportunities in this sphere.

Making sensor data and information from different sources available globally and linking this data and information in a meaningful way - this is the crux of Industry 4.0. New business ideas make it necessary to make this information globally available and accessible not only within a company but also beyond the boundaries of the company and its location.

At this year’s EEF Manufacturing conference it is safe to say, the day did not disappoint. With a lot riding on the consequences to UK industry and companies with Brexit looming, the largest number of people to date attended the day to hear answers and truths about what the professionals and our Government think it will happen. With speeches from Liam Fox Secretary of State, and Leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn, there was a definite feel of excitement from the audience, and the general theme of ‘Global Britain: Change, Opportunity, Growth’ ran significantly throughout the day.