Industry 4.0: Come and hear about it at ACI Connect 2014

Chris Vains will be speaking at ACI Connect 2014 on the subject of Industry 4.0 and what it means for Australian industry. Before joining Siemens, Vains worked in automation project engineering, mainly in the food and beverage, and general manufacturing industries. Now he heads up Automation Systems for Siemens in Australia and New Zealand and was part of the Siemens Picture the Future: Australia 2030 research team.

Many industry experts believe that Industry 4.0 - or the fourth industrial revolution - could be a reality in about 10 to 20 years. The first industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries was the mechanisation of production using water and steam power. It was followed by the second industrial revolution (over the late-19th and early-20th centuries) which introduced mass production with the help of electric power, followed by the digital revolution of the last few decades, with the use of electronics and IT to further automate production. The term ‘Industry 4.0’ was first used in 2011 at the Hanover Fair, and much of the following research has been conducted in Germany, although there have been some similar developments occurring in the US.

More officially, Industry 4.0 is a project that is part of a German government strategy to develop the ‘Smart Factory’, which is characterised by flexible production in which highly networked plants become self-optimising, self-configuring and self-diagnosing.

The ‘intelligence’ of the Smart Factory will be made possible by the use of networking technology, sensors and transmitters that will be embedded in nearly all types of machines, unfinished products and materials, as well as smart tools and new software for structuring data flows. All of these innovations will enable products and machines to communicate with one another and exchange commands. In other words, it is predicted the factories of the future will optimise and control their manufacturing processes largely by themselves.

In many ways, much of the technology necessary for this to happen already exists - only it is broken up into systems that are generally not compatible with each other, using different communication protocols. Industry 4.0 will therefore not be a sudden revolution, but more a slowly evolving process.

In Germany, Siemens has been playing a highly active role in this exciting research. Chris will be able to share some incredible examples of world-leading projects today that provide a glimpse of what the future will look like. During his presentation you will hear how the entire production process and all elements of the production environment will be mapped and linked in digital models, so that the physical and digital worlds of production can converge onto ‘cyber-physical systems’.

I hope you can join us to hear what Chris and Siemens have to say on this very topical and exciting look to the future on 9 April at Melbourne Park Function Centre, and find out what we can do in Australia to prepare for the journey towards Industry 4.0.