Industry 4.0
Technology solutions powering the 4th Industrial Revolution
SOURCE: OPTO 22
Industry 4.0 has been a decade in the making but even now the technology is progressing at a rapid pace. This Industrial Ethernet Book special report on Industry 4.0 looks at the impact of cyber physical systems, data democratization and new solutions for connecting with smart manufacturing operations.
Building Industry 4.0 ready MQTT networks at scale to leverage edge and cloud computing relies on a combination of industrial-strength software solutions. INDUSTRY 4.0 IS THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL production but it also requires solutions individually tailored to each application. The megatrends emerging to drive the technology are focused on creating an ecosystem of solutions aimed at systematic production improvement. In this special report, the Industrial Ethernet Book offers comprehensive coverage and offers the perspective of industry leaders on how Industry 4.0 technologies are shaping the future of the smart factory.
recently. “This continues to drive interest in edge computing as practitioners look for more efficient ways to collect, process, transform, and deliver data to connected systems. For similar reasons, adoption of MQTT and its Sparkplug B payload format continues to increase.” “Together, they are being applied to address long-standing obstacles to I4.0 integration, specifically in the areas of cybersecurity, data democratization, and brownfield retrofits,” he added.
Turning data into decisions
Industrial edge devices
Enabling distributed access to field data
“The Industry 4.0 focus on turning data into decisions as efficiently as possible places a much higher value on distributed access to field data,” Josh Eastburn, Director of Technical Marketing at Opto 22 told IEB
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According to Eastburn, unlike traditional field devices, industrial edge devices provide general-purpose computing, networking, and storage capabilities in addition to standard OT interfaces for data and control. Embedded security measures and communications protocols allow edge devices to bridge the gap
between OT and IT. They are able to connect directly to IT networks and applications, processing and transmitting OT data without relying on external servers. They can also consolidate other automation functions for control, visualization, MES, and more. MQTT was designed to provide secure, lightweight, responsive distributed communication and has become the most popular transport protocol for IoT applications. It uses an efficient, data-agnostic, byte array payload that works for any kind of data, and introduces a novel communication model that is well suited for I4.0 applications. Rather than cyclically polling field devices, MQTTenabled field devices and gateways publish data independently to the MQTT broker (the central server) when they detect a change in a monitored value. This behavior is known as report-by-exception. Other MQTT clients, including software and other field devices,
in d u s t r ial et h er ne t b o o k
09.2021
