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.

Inside the innovations leading the Industry 4.0 manufacturing transformation, there is an emergence at the sensor-driven level. For manufacturers, taking that next step into the future depends on further investment in the technology underpinning advances in factory automation and flexibility.

The question is not whether, but how IEEE 802.11ax (also known as Wi-Fi 6) and 5G are driving wireless mobile communications in the industrial environment. Siemens supports both technologies in order to offer optimal solutions for the most diverse requirements.

In the words of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Although this conclusion was made long before Industry 4.0 and the Smart Factory even came to be, it hits the nail on the head when it comes to machine manufacturing.

At the highest level of “hard customisation” driven by the goals of Industry 4.0, customer-specific interfaces are developed to meet individual customer requirements, with the aim of meeting even the most “unusual” customer wishes in mechanical and plant engineering.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) generates a tremendous amount of data that also needs to be stored. Consequently, more and more data centers are needed to fulfill this growing demand for data storage management, increasing energy consumption in the process.

Managing industrial networks only in local control centers may not be feasible three or five years. It is therefore important to use network management software with integration interfaces such as OPC DA tags for SCADA system integration or RESTful APIs for external web services.

The OPC UA (IEC 62541) framework with the extensions for field exchange (OPC UA FX) specified by the FLC Initiative, in combination with underlying communication technologies such as APL, TSN and 5G, offers a complete, open, standardized and interoperable solution.

An industry expert provides a retrospective on the evolution of industry, the technology that enables it and how leaders can view their operations through a single pane of glass. As use cases and adoption of Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) continue to grow, so do our capabilities of actually making effective…

Going beyond the buzzword, a truly converged business means that decision makers can see and control all aspects of their operation through a single pane of glass. As use cases and adoption of SPE continue to grow, so do our capabilities of actually making effective use of convergence.