What’s next for the future development of manufacturing?

Innovation leads the transformation of Industry 4.0 manufacturing industry

Today, the most valuable resource in manufacturing is not steel, coal or electricity, but data. Manufacturers are embarking on their journey to Industry 4.0, the latest industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence and massive connectivity.

In this new era, companies can use data generated by sensors and digital systems to monitor real-world production processes, laying the foundation for more flexible production models to meet changing consumer demands.

However, consumer demand is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the current focus of Industry 4.0. The industrial workforce and supply chain have been impacted by unprecedented disruptions to the global economy, geopolitics, environment, and demographic issues and crises. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of advanced technology, real-time data, and flexible manufacturing and supply chains.

As automation increases and robots take over repetitive and dangerous tasks, manufacturers can increase the value of their workforce and ensure production continuity. This not only frees up employees to use their brainpower, but also allows them to bring back automated and repetitive tasks that were previously outsourced to do in-house. “People are starting to talk about and focus on more and more capabilities, such as the use of IoT, robotics and augmented reality in manufacturing environments,” said Kaibo Liu, associate director of the Center for IoT Systems Research and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You’ll notice that we’re starting to collect higher and higher resolution data from the manufacturing process, enabling real-time decisions in more areas.”

Manufacturers have had to change the way they operate to respond to this new type of demand, including adopting more localized manufacturing facilities and designing production lines that can be quickly reconfigured for different batch sizes.

Nicola O'Byrne Connected Motion and Robotics Market Manager, Analog Devices

Increasing the localization of supply chains will also increase manufacturing flexibility and reduce environmental impact by reducing transportation complexity. Finally, with reliable real-time data and easily reconfigurable systems, manufacturers can make decisions quickly, such as scheduling maintenance, adjusting machine settings, or switching from garment production to mask production.

Some elements of the next industrial revolution remain aspirational visions of the future, such as a group of autonomous robots collaborating to complete advanced tasks such as construction, recovery and rescue, and some aspects have already become a reality. Decentralized 3D printing equipment is a typical example, which shortens the time to market and customer delivery time of advanced manufacturing technologies. If you work with the right partners, today's companies can gain the advantages of efficiency, safety and productivity brought by Industry 4.0 manufacturing technology and lay the foundation for the next transformation of the manufacturing industry.

The 4th Industrial Revolution
The 3rd Industrial Revolution brought us electronics, computing, telecommunications and digital technologies that allowed manufacturers to design factories to mass produce a few products or even a single product. Consumers today want more choices and a higher degree of customization than in the 1920s or early 21st century, requiring greater flexibility.

“If you want to buy a car, you have a lot of options,” said Kevin Carlin, vice president of Otosense AI, a condition-based monitoring division at Analog Devices. “Manufacturers need to be able to cater to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of different configurations. And they also need to manage the entire factory and supply chain to be able to respond to that demand in real time and configure the factory to go from one mode to another.”

Making this leap is not easy. Most factories rely on an existing, potentially outdated technology ecosystem. Simply replacing old equipment with new is expensive and often impractical. So, the transition to Industry 4.0 manufacturing should rely on augmentation, not replacement—bringing intelligence enabled by modern IT technology to existing equipment in the factory.

Partners like Analog Devices are helping manufacturers start adopting emerging technologies like condition monitoring by building sensor-driven wireless communication networks at the production level. This allows factories to monitor the health of specific equipment or parts through sensors, proactively identifying, diagnosing, and resolving anomalies before they cause problems or even complete failures. This real-time monitoring can help extend equipment life and increase throughput. Given that the cost of unplanned downtime can account for nearly a quarter of total manufacturing costs, adopting predictive maintenance has the potential to deliver significant cost savings and productivity gains.

Cost of Downtime
Unplanned downtime is costly to manufacturers, and preventing it is a key goal and feature of Industry 4.0 manufacturing technologies.

23.9% of total manufacturing costs come from downtime costs

Source: “Costs and Benefits of Adopting Advanced Maintenance in Manufacturing,” U.S. Department of Commerce, April 2018.

Bringing IT Technology to the Factory Floor
With the advent of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are beginning to transition from traditional computer infrastructure to new network solutions to increase speed, improve data management and increase energy efficiency.

Hardware-Enabled Security
One of the core concepts of Industry 4.0 manufacturing is called “interoperability,” the ability to transmit real-time data among a large number of Industrial IoT devices. Manufacturing floors use devices, software protocols, and proprietary networks from many equipment manufacturers. Until now, there has been no way to enable these individual protocols and networks to communicate with each other. The advent of time-sensitive networking (TSN) will enable this capability for the first time.
Today’s smart factories generate a large amount of data, so in order to achieve interoperability, a reliable field network must be built first. Real-time deterministic Ethernet is a technology that can help achieve this goal, which can more effectively manage the massive amounts of data in connected factories. In addition to leading in sensor technology, partners such as Analog Devices are also pioneering hardware improvements (such as real-time deterministic Ethernet switches) to help build the central nervous system of the factory.

“Establish real-time, high-bandwidth connections between systems to more effectively control individual production processes, thereby increasing efficiency.”

——Martin Cotter Senior Vice President of Sales and Digital Marketing, Analog Devices

“In the transformation from physical to digital, our mission is to ensure that information generated at the edge can now be transmitted to any device in a given factory,” said Martin Cotter, senior vice president of global sales and digital marketing at Analog Devices. “Establishing real-time, high-bandwidth connections between systems to more effectively control each production process will increase efficiency, help increase certainty of output, and enable the next generation of industrial processes,” he added.

Once interoperability is achieved, manufacturers can begin to adopt exciting advances in Industry 4.0 manufacturing, such as robots and “cobots” that can work alongside humans in factories. Like self-driving cars, these machines rely on advanced sensing solutions that can sense their surroundings in three dimensions, ensuring a high degree of safety as they perform repetitive, complex tasks.

The factory of the future

Next-generation solutions will deliver on the promise of Industry 4.0, helping to increase productivity, efficiency, safety and flexibility.

Robots and cobots

Using sensor-enabled analytics, factories can proactively identify and resolve machinery issues before they cause machine failure and interrupt production.

wireless sensor network

Network products customized for industrial environments can enable IoT communications even in harsh manufacturing environments, which bring new challenges to RF.

Robots and cobots

Advanced motion control and sensing solutions are making robot-human collaboration a reality and are beginning to be used in factory environments.

Partners like ADI can combine different sensing modalities (such as vision and time of flight) with connectivity technologies (such as deterministic Ethernet) to transmit data in real time and control robots and cobots more accurately. According to one report, using these tools could help U.S. manufacturers save an estimated $40.4 billion per year.

“We provide data wherever data is generated. For 50 years, customers have trusted ADI to help them solve their toughest engineering challenges. Our deep domain experience provides a solid foundation for us to work with our customers today to drive future developments.”

——Martin Cotter Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Digital Marketing, Analog Devices

For manufacturers, moving into the future requires further investment in advanced technologies to drive factory automation and increase flexibility. The benefits of Industry 4.0 are truly reflected at the sensor-driven level that connects the physical world with the digital world.