The future of control systems and Industry 4.0

The move to Industry 4.0 will bring with it many advances in efficiency and productivity, but also many changes in the way industrial processes work.

Recently, there have been many articles written on the next industrial revolution, known as ‘Industrie 4.0’ — the German approach to smart manufacturing. It is the German vision for the future of manufacturing, one where smart factories use information and communications technologies to digitise their processes and reap huge benefits in the form of improved quality, lower costs and increased efficiency.

Coupled with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) — where industrial devices are connected to each other via the internet — the sheer volume of real-time data (big data) this will create means Industry 4.0 will bring about a massive change to the way control systems function today. We will require factories, processes, plant and machinery all to be continuously adapted and optimised to suit the ever fast-changing requirements for manufacturing.

As one of 10 ‘Future Projects’ identified as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan, the German government is planning to invest over €200m, and when coupled with the investments of companies in the German private sector — which are estimated at 10 times this figure — the German manufacturing industry is investing huge sums into Industry 4.0.

In Australia we should shortly start to see the control system changes as a result of this Industry 4.0 investment as German automation equipment manufacturers market and sell their Industry 4.0-ready products and solutions.

The move to distributed control functions

In a smart factory under Industry 4.0, control systems will be distributed across the entire plant or machine — rather than a centralised PLC with remote I/O that is common today. There could be multiple PLCs all talking to one another, each having its own program. From the software program these PLCs will see each other just like remote I/O, with no special set-up required to have everything in sync. HMIs will also act as controllers, processing their programs locally rather the sending information to a PLC — reducing the cycle times of processes.

Consider a traditional plant or machine, with one controller and many remote I/Os, as show in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Traditional plant or machine with a single master controller.

The ‘brain’ of the process lives in the MCC and all signals are sent between the remote cabinets and the brain, sometimes going back and forth just between the one remote I/O and PLC — doubling reaction times.

In an Industry 4.0 system there is no ‘central hub’ as such (see Figure 2). The I/Os on the controller are processed locally, so there is no additional traffic on the network. Each controller talks to the others via an Industrial Ethernet protocol.

Figure 2: Plant or machine under Industry 4.0 with reduced overhead.

Real-time information from anywhere and everywhere

Visualisation and diagnostics will be possible anywhere, not just on a local HMI. With your smartphone or tablet you can interact and view the plant visualisation and access instant diagnostics, whether you’re on-site, at home or away for the weekend.

Traditionally, visualisation systems have used custom platforms for the visualisation, but this will be a thing of the past with web standards becoming the norm. HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript will be utilised, meaning standard devices used to view websites — a PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone — can be used to access the critical plant information and easily share it with all stakeholders.

We will see the visualisation systems start to suboptimise pages — just like a browser, where it remembers your favourite pages, your history and automatically creates your own pages based on your viewing habits.

The ‘cloud’ will also enter the space of control systems — with large amounts of archived process data accessible from anywhere on the planet.

Software not hardware

In line with the digitisation that Industry 4.0 heralds, future control system functionality will be decided by software and firmware upgrades and be completely independent of hardware in the future. This will allow the user to purchase the control system hardware with limited functionality and as requirements increase they can continue to upgrade to add additional functionality as required — such as faster cycle times, additional communication interfaces etc.

Today manufacturers may have many versions of the same PLC with different memory capacities or cycle times. By allowing the user to determine the functionality of the hardware, this minimises the number of spares required and keeps maintenance costs down.

It also allows faster update times when new functionality is developed as you can have this functionality available as soon as you upgrade your firmware, in the same way as a smartphone.

Smarter devices

As devices become smarter and more capable, we will see more and more data associated with the devices stored locally. We are already seeing operational data, maintenance data and calibration data being stored locally on the device — no matter how small — which can be accessed easily by a variety of technologies such as near field communications (NFC) on your smartphone.

The next step is then to feed this data back into the manufacturing or maintenance processes so that suppliers can further refine and optimise manufacturing processes or maintenance techniques for the sensors, instrument or device.

Industry 4.0 protocols

As more and more data becomes available, more sophisticated protocols will be required to manage the entire data flow. Data for all the various devices and systems will need to be in a format recognisable by all, otherwise the data will be meaningless. This is a challenge for the entire industry as it moves towards agreeing on a common framework and platform for Industry 4.0 to operate with.

Security is a also a big issue — with more and more devices connecting to the network and the internet, additional requirements for security will be necessary to ensure all of this data remains safe and secured. It is a fine line between allowing access to all that can use the data for meaningful purposes and securing it from those that don’t need it or shouldn’t have it.

Summary

With this extra data comes extra complexity and extra disorder; the challenge will always remain in turning this huge amount of data into meaningful information that you can use to digitise and optimise your processes.

But certainly adapting to — and implementing — the themes that Industry 4.0 introduces represents an investment in the future.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Blaz Kure