IIoT Progress Report
IIoT architectures revolutionize production management SOURCE: SIEMENS
Ever shorter response times, increasing volatility and almost unmanageable complexity are bringing production challenges into sharp focus. But the IIoT is providing a new architecture for factory automation which enables an ultra-flexible production concept for companies – for greater adaptivity and resilience.
In the industrial IoT, all automation components and smart objects are flexibly linked to one another and connected to cloud systems THE DEFINING ARCHITECTURAL PATTERN IS still the so-called automation pyramid, which is characterized by a hierarchical structure and, due to lower bandwidths and processing capacities in the past, a compression per level. Production orders are controlled from the top (management level) to the bottom (field level) and enriched by additional (local) knowledge (e.g. robot programs) depending on the level. On the other hand, status information, sensor data etc. are compressed from bottom to top to an increasing degree.
Ultra-flexible manufacturing
However, to allow a new level of flexibility, the automation pyramid needs to be opened up. Fixed chains of processes will play an increasingly smaller role in the ultra-flexible manufacturing of the future; instead, there will be flexible machine parks that will be used dynamically, i.e. based on workload, for individual production orders. Fleets of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) will handle the transport of materials and semi-finished products. Other operations will involve multioperable manufacturing islands, for example, 02.202 2
in which skilled workers carry out a wide variety of assembly tasks and which are also controlled dynamically and based on orders. Production chains will also become more resilient. If there is a sudden order peak or, conversely, a resource bottleneck, fast reconfiguration of manufacturing structures virtually in real time should be possible. This will have a range of consequences: Firstly, infrastructure networks available as in every place equally will be required to operate the AGVs and reconfigure the machine parks. Secondly, factory management can no longer be top-down, but must be supplemented by data from the field level. This involves, on the one hand, information such as "Material XY has now arrived at production island 123" and, on the other hand, status data from devices such as power supply units to allow targeted and fast detection of any faults. Finally, the factory of the future needs to function as an organism that is continually optimized and developed. It must be possible to access all required information at the press of a button, without needing to adapt control programs, for example.
i n d u str i a l e th e r n e t b o o k
Costs for data will be almost zero
In particular, the availability of all information is essential – also without knowing the specific use case beforehand. Its importance can be compared to that of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. Before the printing press, replicating and distributing information (in the form of books) was extremely expensive and error-prone; it was necessary before the "copy job" to carefully consider which books were worth replicating and which were not. However, with the invention of the printing press, costs decreased to a minimal level so that all authors could publish their work with low financial risk – and recipients could then decide what was useful and would therefore be bought and what would be forgotten. For the factory of the future, the digital transformation and the IIoT play a similar role to Gutenberg's printing press. In this case, also, it is now the case that the replication, storage and processing of data is almost free, and this data is no longer only used in the context of advance planning, but is (possibly) used when it transpires to be important at some time in the life cycle of the factory.
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