Industry 4.0: an overview from the perspective of a German-headquartered firm Dr. Peter Köhler, Chief Executive Officer Dr. Björn Six, Vice President Business Unit Machinery Solutions Dr. Jan Stefan Michels, Vice President Standard & Technology Development Weidmüller Group
3. EXEMPLARY APPLICATION AREAS OF INDUSTRY 4.0 As described above, the technological core of Industry 4.0 lies in the communication skills and the networking of all components of a production system, including the workpieces and products produced and the availability of information that arises as a result. The question as to the benefit arising for the end user, i.e. the operator of machines and systems, as well as the buyer of the products, has only been partially answered to date. From a strategic viewpoint, this includes the potential stated in section 2. Specific applications that actually demonstrate this potential and render it quantifiable are still emerging. On the basis of our experience in the development and production of industrial connectivity and automation technology, we are in a position to mention the following applications as pioneering examples. They were realised over the course of development projects and cooperation agreements with university institutes and end users and have since been operatively adopted in production by the Weidmüller Group.
robótica 106, 1.o Trimestre de 2017
robótica
10
artigo científico
2.nd Part
3.1. Energy management/increase in the efficient use of resources in production systems Due to the scarcity of resources and the enormous increase in energy costs over recent years, the pressure on producing companies to manage their energy consumption and to raise cost potential has risen significantly. Nonetheless, solutions for holistic energy management through to optimisation of the ongoing production processes have been rarely found to date. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises today still shy away from the seemingly high expense of installing such solutions and creating the required transparency. The key is to equip the production machines and plant with measuring instruments for energy and other process parameters, such as compressed air and temperature, as well as their consistent networking. This creates the required transparency of resource consumption in a factory and hence the basis for optimising resource consumption – especially energy consumption, of course. The fundamentals for this are measuring instruments plus the associated tools for storing, displaying and evaluating the consumption data. Plug-and-play capable solutions now exist that encompass all components, can be quickly and easily implemented and work perfectly with energy management software. We link these energy data with information from other data sources, such as superordinate corporate systems (ERP / Enterprise Resource Planning, MES / Manufacturing Execution
System), but also from sources outside the company like the current price for electrical energy. This allows savings potential to be identified, optimisation measures to be derived and – under certain circumstance – also automatically implemented. The outcome is considerable progress in resource efficiency, particularly in energy consumption, but also in the use of compressed air, raw materials and other auxiliary materials in production. We have introduced this approach in our plastics production and achieved convincing results.
Figure 3. Energy measurement in production.
3.2. Condition monitoring and diagnosis An application based on similar principles as energy management is condition monitoring. This is the detailed recording of the condition of the machine and system components, as well as the production processes. The aim is to recognise anomalies at an early stage in order to optimise the production process and to avoid faults or even failures of machine components through preventive maintenance. The potential of condition monitoring therefore lies in process optimisation and the availability of production facilities. Thanks to the enormous advancements in microsystem technology, there are now a series of sensors available for recording physical parameters that did not exist until quite recently or only at high prices. This puts us in a position to equip machine components and automation equipment with sensors that can autonomously, precisely and continuously record their state, as well as that of the production process. At the same time, small and inexpensive microprocessors are available that allow powerful analysis tools and algorithms to be implemented on such devices to evaluate data. This provides us with the means of extensively observing and analysing the condition of our machines and systems, including the process parameters, over their entire lifecycle.