In order to increase their profitability, sustainability, and future-readiness, factories must think about how they will appear not just in 2020, but also in 2025 or perhaps 2030. Consumer expectations for greater personalization and individualization, as well as a need to more carefully manage resources as we begin to consider our impact on the environment and the world, are some trends that can help us predict where the shop floor is headed.
Here are five strategies to begin achieving this future reality, even though providing tailored goods and at the same time optimising the use of energy, water, and other resources may appear contradictory.
The automation sector has been talked about for the last few years. The "sample size one" idea asks how production lines can create unique items without encountering lengthy changeover periods or other inefficiencies. This vision must finally materialize with Industry 4.0 to satisfy the demand for complete individualization in production. On the factory floor, where they are commissioned, parameterized, and tuned for one particular product that is produced repeatedly over the course of months or even years, machines cannot be set up in a permanent, rigid fashion to suit this. Future production lines must be adaptable, comprised of numerous, easily reconfigurable mechatronic modules, with an increasing number of robots or "cobots" (collaborative robots working alongside human workers), and an AI that parametrizes and tunes the machines in accordance with the next task.- personalised - product made on the assembly line.
Comprehensive testing on the physical machine becomes more difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately impossible as software complexity and the number of possible combinations of modularized software components increase. Given this, it will be crucial to execute virtual software commissioning to check for problems and confirm that requirements based on simulation models are met before the actual production line is even set up. Multi Domain simulation models are already being used by innovation leaders like Krones, the world's largest producer of bottle filling machines, for virtual commissioning.
Interconnectivity will be crucial since the factory's machines and modules will be dynamically reorganised. The smooth interoperability of equipment from many vendors would be made possible by standardised protocols like OPC UA TSN. Flexible wireless protocols like 5G and its offshoots will take the place of rigid cables. But machines will also be linked to cloud computing platforms, where flexible computing power is available for running strong algorithms on data from engineering and business applications.
A new level of software capability is being enabled by the fast rising computing power of industrial controllers, edge computing devices, and cloud systems, as well as their application.systems for manufacturing. AI-based algorithms will dynamically optimise the production line's throughput while consuming the least amount of energy and other resources possible. Predictive maintenance will develop and take into account data from many factories and across equipment from several vendors, in addition to data from a single machine or location. The algorithms will be used on both non-real-time platforms and real-time systems like PLCs, depending on the requirements, as Beckhoff recently showed at Hannover Messe in Germany.
However, future manufacturing workers will be the ones who will be most impacted. More engineers and scientists—not just data scientists—will work on AI by utilising the tools and technology provided by organisations like MathWorks. Future manufacturing facilities
To address the aforementioned tendencies, engineers who can create models, work with massive data sets, and use the appropriate development tools are needed. To prepare for a future where Industry 4.0 is just the beginning, businesses that manufacture and operate industrial equipment must alter their job ads and hire qualified engineers with completely different profiles.
Mathworks sees a bright future in system simulation. They would advertise The Coder and Simulink. They would disregard the compiler and object-oriented syntax. They will attempt to emulate the usability and tools of development platforms like Visual Studio and Eclipse.
