THE FUTURE OF CONTROL SYSTEMS
AND INDUSTRY 4.0
Scott Moffat, Managing Director, Pilz Australia Industrial Automation
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.
R
ecently, 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.
14 WHAT'S NEW IN PROCESS TECHNOLOGY - MARCH 2016
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. The ‘brain’ of the process lives in the MCC and all signals are sent between the remote cabinets and the brain, sometimes going
MCC
CC1
CC2
CC3
CC4
CC5
Figure 1: Traditional plant or machine with a single master controller.
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