Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1437657
13 Industry 4.0 and Beyond | ADI "There are more and more capabilities people are discussing, like the use of IoT (Internet of Things), robots, and augmented reality in manufacturing settings," says Kaibo Liu, associate director of the IoT Systems Research Center and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "You'll start to see higher and higher resolution data gathered from the manufacturing process, making more aspects of decision-making possible in real-time." More localized supply chains can also add new flexibility to manufacturing, with the added benefit of reduced environmental impact from lower transportation complexity. Finally, with reliable and real-time data and easily reconfigurable systems, manufacturers can make decisions quickly, such as scheduling maintenance, adjust a machine setting, or pivot from making shirts to face masks. Although some elements of the next industrial revolution remain aspirational—such as fleets of autonomous robots cooperating on advanced tasks that include construction, recovery, and rescue—others are already being realized. One example is decentralized 3D printing facilities, which reduce time to market and time to the customer for advanced manufacturing. With the right partners, today's businesses can access many of the gains in efficiency, safety, and productivity promised by Industry 4.0 manufacturing and set the stage for the transformative next step in manufacturing. The Fourth Revolution The Third Industrial Revolution brought us electronics, computing, telecommunications, and digital technologies. This allowed manufacturers to design factories to mass-produce a small number of products, or even a single product, at high volume. Today, a greater level of flexibility is required as consumers expect more options and levels of customization than what was available in the 1920s—or the early 2000s, for that matter. "If you want to buy a car, there are many options you can choose from," says Kevin Carlin, vice president of condition-based monitoring Otosense™ AI at Analog Devices. "Manufacturers need to be able to cater to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different configurations. Then they need to manage the entire plant and supply chain to be able to respond to that in real-time, and configure their factories to move from one model to another." Making the leap is no simple matter. Most factories rely on an existing, sometimes dated, technology ecosystem. Simply replacing old equipment with new equipment is expensive and often unrealistic. It's one reason why the road to Industry 4.0 manufacturing can be a matter of augmentation rather than replacement, bringing the intelligence enabled by modern-day IT down to the machines already on the factory floor. By setting up a wireless, sensor-driven communication network at the production level, partners such as Analog Devices help manufacturers realize the promise of emerging technologies such as condition-based monitoring. Here, the health of a specific machine or part can be monitored by sensors, allowing plants to identify, diagnose and solve abnormalities before they become an issue or possibly even fail outright. This real-time monitoring can help extend equipment lifespans and increase throughput. Given that unscheduled downtime can amount to nearly a quarter of total manufacturing costs, predictive maintenance has the potential to unlock significant savings and productivity. Hardware Meets Hard Hats At the heart of Industry 4.0 manufacturing is a concept known as interoperability, or the ability to communicate real-time data across numerous Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices. Manufacturing floors use equipment, software protocols, and proprietary networks from several equipment manufacturers (Figure 1). These individual protocols and networks haven't found a way to talk to each other to date. The emergence of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) will enable this for the first time. "MANUFACTURERS ARE FORCED TO CHANGE HOW THEY OPERATE TO RESPOND TO THIS NEW TYPE OF DEMAND, INCLUDING MORE LOCALIZED MANUFACTURING FACILITIES AND BY DESIGNING PRODUCTION LINES THAT CAN BE QUICKLY RECONFIGURED FOR DIFFERENT BATCH SIZES." — Nicola O'Byrne, Marketing Manager, Connected Motion and Robotics | ADI Figure 1: Manufacturing floors use equipment, software protocols, and proprietary networks from several equipment manufacturers. (Analog Devices Inc.) 1