What is Industry 4.0?

We are entering the Age of the 4th Industrial Revolution - but what is it, and does it frighten or excite you? 

The great breakthrough of Industry 4.0, as it is being called, is the networking of machinery. This, it is predicted, will have a similar effect on industrial processes as steam power, electrical energy and computing in the three previous 'Industrial Revolutions'. The simplest definition would be that it is the application of the Internet of Things on the factory floor - machinery and products that communicate with each other on the production line.

The chief executive of Siemens, Anton Huber, calls it "the ability to literally have everything imaginable connected to a network so that information from all these connected 'things' can be stored, transferred, analysed and acted upon in new, and usually automated ways via network connections with everything else".

Industry 4.0 first surfaced in Germany and received its public UK debut earlier this year. A conference dedicated to the subject was held in January at the National Space Museum in Leicester, while the UK's first "digital factory" has been built and is running at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry.

 

The Industry 4.0 demonstrator is a joint project by a number of organisations, including industry bodies ESCO, automation trade association GAMBICA, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, enterprise location intelligence provider Ubisense and robotics specialist Shadow Robot. The demonstrator uses existing real-world machines to create a continuous production line, to which users can interact by adding new technologies, as a way of discovering how different data can affect the functions of the robotic elements of the system.  

The Industry 4.0 demonstrator at the MTC

The digitisation of production processes offers huge opportunities for robotics and specialist engineering, and lobbying is currently taking place for a £12m fund to develop aspects of the technology for the future benefit of the UK. New electronic components are also being developed for integration into Industry 4.0, by companies such as Phoenix Contact, Siemens and Festo. Phoenix Contact is developing terminal rails which can be individually populated with terminal blocks, while Festo is working on 'intelligent components' which will be able to organise themselves in automated systems. 

Are you excited about the opportunities presented by this new Industrial Revolution? Are you involved with the technology within your own business?