Industry 4.0 – How digitalization and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) lead to the next industrial revolution
Due to the digitalization of society and the benefits generated through consumer electronics industries and their companies have to overcome the obstacle of applying innovative information technologies to improve their businesses and profit from the current digitalization of everyday life and its inherent support of connectivity. Main focus of this article is to shed light on the upcoming digitalization of industries as well as shortly explain buzzwords like Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. Further aim is to provide an insight into beneficial aspects of innovative information technologies and give examples on possible concepts for improving the manufacturing industry.
Brief historical recap
Before focusing on the upcoming fourth industrial revolution let’s have a brief look at the history of industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution happened in the 18th century and was driven by water and steam power, which was utilized for the mechanization of production. Almost one century later electricity was invented, which led to the second industrial revolution and favored the development of mass production. Another 100 years later in 1969 the third industrial revolution started. To enable automated production processes electronics and information technologies were used. [1][2]
…and now Industry 4.0
Currently, only 50 years later, the next revolution is occurring. It is based on digitalization and emerging information technologies as well as the previous step of industrialization. A key characteristic is the ability to connect physical, digital and human actors. The main difference to the other steps of industrialization is the fact, that we are aware of the revolution currently taking place and can thereby influence it, whereas in the past the evidence of a revolution got only visible afterwards in form of benefits. [1][3]
The term Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution and was first mentioned on the Hanover Exhibition 2011. Emerging technologies like Big Data and Analytics, Cloud and Fog Computing as well as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can be seen as enabler and driver of Industry 4.0. The processing and storage capabilities lie within Cloud and Fog Computing whereas Big Data and Analytics have the ability to cope with tremendous datasets, which need to be analyze to support decision-making. [3]
The Industrial Internet of Things is often interchangeably used to Industry 4.0. This concept enables the communication within a production or company through connecting almost everything to the internet. Thus not only the communication between manufacturing machines via machine-to-machine-communication (M2M) is supported, furthermore human-machine-interfaces (HMI) enable the supervision and control of machines by human actors. Through the concept of intelligent or smart devices, enriched with sensors, actuators, microcontroller and a communication component a massive amount of real-time raw data about the production process can be harvested and a data flow can be implemented. Data is send to the cloud and big data components, where it is analyzed and feedback is generated, which flows back to the device to influence current inefficiencies. [3]
All these concepts and technologies enable the construction of a smart factory consisting of cyber-physical systems. Everything in the manufacturing process for instance machines and resources are enhanced with computing and communication capabilities to enable the gathering and analysis of data and thereby get real-time insights into production processes which can, based on that, be improved or even predicted. [3]
…any beneficial aspects?
At this point only few benefits of applying the Internet of Things in an industrial context and the progressing of the fourth industrial revolution shall be named. Through its inherent connectivity some interesting concepts can be implemented.
To hold up a factory’s production capacity and efficiency the tremendous amount of raw data collected can be analyzed to uncover discrepancies and based on that intervene to enhance manufacturing processes. The underlying concept is called Predictive Maintenance. [4]
One of the biggest advantages is the implementation of Mass Customization. This strategy combines the benefits of a mass with a customizable production. In Mass Customization the customer is able to customize its individual product while it is manufactured with the efficiency of mass production. The flexibility is achieved through enhancing production resources with RFID technology for the delegation of the manufacturing process and the rapid reconfiguration of machinery to meet individual requirements. [5]
To conclude the excursion to the evolving Industry 4.0 and understand its impacts on the way companies will manufacture and communicate to their customers in the future parts of the official Platform Industry 4.0 definition translated by PwC are used:
“The term Industry 4.0 stands for the fourth industrial revolution. Best understood as a new level of organisation and control over the entire value chain of the life cycle of products, it is geared towards increasingly individualised customer requirements. […] The basis for the fourth industrial revolution is the availability of all relevant information in real time by connecting all instances involved in the value chain. The ability to derive the optimal value-added flow at any time from the data is also vital. The connection of people, things and systems creates dynamic, self-organising, real-time optisised value-added connections within and across companies. These can be optimised according to different criteria such as costs, availability and consumption of resources.” [6]
References:
- [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
- [2] https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/industry-40-information-briefing-roundtable-discussion-tickets-27755807367#
- [3] Gilchrist, Alasdair: Industry 4.0 – The Industrial Internet of Things, apress, 2016
- [4] https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/focus/industry-4-0/using-predictive-technologies-for-asset-maintenance.html
- [5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316683996_Mass_Customization_in_the_Context_of_Industry_40_Implications_of_Variety-induced_Complexity
- [6] https://www.pwc.nl/en/assets/documents/pwc-industrie-4-0.pdf, 2014
4 comments on “Industry 4.0 – How digitalization and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) lead to the next industrial revolution”
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Thank you, Christina, for an excellent post on thoughts about the next wave of changes in industry. In my opinion, manufacturing in particular stands to benefit from IoT because the improved affordability/density of sensor and control data allowing aggregating across an industrial base will enable effective predictive maintenance to become a reality. In the electric utility industry, we typically dealt with planned maintenance activities (refueling outages, for example) using sophisticated planning and scheduling to enable implementation of supplier updates, technology upgrades, system design changes, and equipment replacement in parallel while refueling was occurring. We had industry owner’s groups to try and understand common system issues across customers of a like technology, but with power plants having hundreds and thousands of components, finding commonality required use of manual investigation from computer-generated reports. Today, with sensory input being more pervasive and big data analytics a nascent reality, the ability to recognize an impending problem well before it materializes and mitigate it promises to improve system/plant availability.
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Thanks, David, for your comment.
Sensors, its data and the ability of storing, combining and analyzing this data can really have an impact and improve how maintenance is carried out in the future. As you said it will improve the availability of plants, systems and production processes and by that reduce the costs regarding loss of production companies are facing today.
A huge advantage is the capability nowadays to store historical data as reference and by that have the ability to detect patterns of failure as well as the real-time analysis of data and the early detection of irregularities due to comparability of multiple datasets.
Thank you, Christina, for the thoughtful article.
I had a question related to predictive maintenance in light of some of the comments made by Simon Chan at Friday’s meeting. Simon mentioned that it is best to retain as much information as possible for the future because it is not clear at this time what data we will analyze for needs like predictive maintenance. One example he gave was to store customer voice data so that some day we could use tone, etc. to analyze customer patterns. I’m sure analogies could be made to industrial equipment.
Data storage, however, has a cost. How would you justify the cost of storing data that may or may not be used in the surveillance of equipment?
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This is a really good and tough question and I have no answer to it. The problem is nowadays that we cannot decide which datasets or sensor outputs will be important for analysis in the future. If we are not storing certain data we might loose our competitive advantage for new business models or more efficient production process in the future. But at the same time we have a huge amount of costs for something we cannot be sure about if it will benefit us.
In my opinion companies should use all the produced data for their real-time analysis but decide about how to filter and which data to store as historical records. Furthermore storage is getting more affordable year by year and cloud computing is an enabler as well.