Smart factory

The way machines interact is likely to change dramatically over the next decade, as Industry 4.0 becomes a reality.

Experts predict that in the plant of the not-so-distant future, each piece of equipment will have the means to communicate.

In this Internet of Things (IoT), embedded software and sensors will interconnect to create the ultimate ‘smart’ process plant.

IoT is about moving more applications to the internet which could be anywhere in world and are not within the company firewall or on a local server

Simon Rogers, managing director of Yokogawa UK

According to Terry Scuoler, chief executive of manufacturing trade body EEF, eight out of ten British manufacturers say Industry 4.0 will have become a business reality by 2025.

“The UK must take a leading role if we are to realise our ambitions for a healthy, balanced and growing economy,” says Scuoler.

However, the EEF’s recent survey of 206 manufacturing decision makers found that almost six out of ten manufacturers believed that the UK was in danger of being left behind.

Key challenges they identified were the levels of investment required (70%), impact on skills (59%) and keeping on top of technological advances (58%).

Robert Brooks, product marketing manager at Omron Electronics, says there are plenty of activities leading to the IoT that companies could do today, but are not.

“In a production line you can have a vision system, robots, sensors, inverter drives, and servo motors.” he says.

“The control system could be monitoring the working of those devices and reconfiguring them to suit the requirements of the process.

“It requires interconnected devices that are intelligent either one way or two ways. And you’d also have a central control system that is able to talk to a lot of machines.”

However, Brooks says that the current requirement to buy products with embedded communications technology is holding the market back, as it often increases up-front costs.

“There is also a decision to be made when it comes to networking infrastructure,” he says.

“Certain manufacturers may press for Ethernet, while others might go another way. The thing to remember is all of these technologies deliver a similar thing. When they get into a manufacturing environment they provide a lot of flexibility to the user.”

Once you have your communication protocols sorted out, then you can start to link machines to intelligent manufacturing systems.

“These might be fillers or depositors, mixers and cookers and they all need to be able talk to another,” he says.

“This means that a lot of the guesswork that goes on now could be taken out, so we know that the product being made is going into the right packaging, and coded correctly, so when it ends up in supermarket it won’t be sent back.

[This] is something that is increasingly important with short manufacturing runs, flash packs and promotions.”

Dan Rossek, marketing manager at Omron says that in Industry 4.0, production may no longer be a linear process.

“Instead production lines will be circular,” he says.

“A product coming in at some point on the line, needing to go through a number of processes, will communicate what needs to be done and then look at what stations are free,” he says.

“Each product variant will communicate what it is, and each station will react to that data to perform appropriate processes.”

For example, if there is a bottleneck at some point in the production line, the product will recognise this and look to see if there are other processes that might be accomplished first, and instruct the line to reroute its progress, he says.

According to a recent whitepaper on Process Automation and the IoT published by the ARC Advisory Group, intelligent field devices, digital field networks, Internet Protocol-enabled connectivity and web services, historians, and advanced analytics software will be the foundation of IoT.

“Now, rather than having to build, integrate, and support purpose-built industrial solutions, automation suppliers and end users alike can reach out and embrace a wide variety of lower cost, fully supported commercial technologies within their industrial connectivity solutions,” it says.

Simon Rogers, managing director of Yokogawa UK, says there are a number of ways IoT is being rolled out in plants, particularly in sites where safety is a key consideration.

At the most basic level, this means an increase in the number of sensors being deployed.

Rogers adds that the cost of sensors is falling, and some are also becoming smarter, with functions such as GPS built in so they are location aware and can be moved around.

Advanced applications to support decision making for both process and maintenance engineers are also being developed, he says.

This allows process and mechanical engineers to work with data scientists to “analyse large sets of structured and unstructured process, asset, and energy-related plant data over time”.

Also driving progress is wireless technology that can be integrated much more cheaply than wired networks for non-critical applications.

“There has also been a move towards more distributed control out in the field,” he says.

“In the future the PID loop (used in process control) could be completely distributed in the field, deciding how to adjust the valve based on a process variable such as temperature, pressure or flow.”

At a higher level comes the shift away from client server architecture, says Rogers.

“IoT is about moving more applications to the internet which could be anywhere in world and are not within the company firewall or on a local server,” he says.

“This means that applications traditionally run on a local server will increasingly be mobile rather than computer based.”

Holding back the move into the cloud, however, is data security.

“[There] is a fear of hackers overriding safety systems, with the potential to cause a huge amount of damage,” he says.

Another obstacle to development of Industry 4.0 is the lack of industrial standards to enable communications between different devices, although there is “a lot of work is going on in this area to ensure everything is interoperable,” he says.

Mark Proctor, managing director of European Automation, says many plants have overcome these hurdles, to operate with minimal human interaction.

“Additive manufacturing machines can be left alone to print day and night once they have been designated a task,” he says.

“These processes benefit manufacturers by minimising defects and downtime, therefore boosting efficiency.”

The Siemens Electronic Works facility in Amberg, Germany is a 108,000-square-foot high-tech facility with an array of smart machines that coordinate everything from production to global product distribution.

The custom, built-to-order process involves more than 1.6 billion components for over 50,000 annual product variations, for which Siemens sources about 10,000 materials from 250 suppliers to make the plant’s 950 different products.

Despite the endless variables within this system, a Gartner Group industry research study conducted in 2010 found that the plant boasts a reliability rate of more than 99%, with only 15 defects in every million.

“You can therefore see the importance of keeping such an efficient automation process up and running,” says Proctor.