Page 10 - trends in automation

environmentally friendly and sophisticated production at a
reasonable cost in Germany in the future.
Does this mean entirely new possibilities for production?
Wahlster: Yes, the ability of machines to understand a given
situation will result in a whole new level of quality in industrial
production. The interaction between a large number of
individual components will produce solutions that have never
before been programmed in a production plant. In physics
and biology we call this phenomenon ‘emergence’. A good
example is an ant colony, in which the individual insect is
not particularly intelligent, but when a large number of ants
work together they can produce astonishing solutions for
finding food and fending off predators. In essence, the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon is also
found in “Factory 4.0”. If a component is damaged or if a
part fails completely, the remaining operational components
together develop a type of self healing process, which identifies
the damage, estimates its extent, finds alternative solutions
for the current production task and authorises corresponding
maintenance or repair work, which must, of course, be carried
out by trained personnel as it has always been.
Just like in the ant colony, this demands highly efficient
communication. How is this resolved in Industry 4.0?
Wahlster: A critical success factor for Industry 4.0 is intelligent
interpretation of the environmental information. The software
therefore plays a key role. It should not only record the sensor
information and relay it as a bit sequence, but it must also
understand the content in context. To this end, the factory
software of the future will also have a system of concepts
that allows the function of system components, production
tasks, states and events to be clearly described. Industry 4.0
thus facilitates high quality semantic communication, which
can be understood not only by the people in the factory, but
also by the factory machines. In order for this to work, we
need standardised description languages and the Internet as
a communication platform in the factory. The current chaos
created by countless bus systems will be replaced by a single,
world wide standardised protocol: Internet Protocol on a real
time capable WLAN or Ethernet.
So Industry 4.0 uses the Internet for communication between
system components?
Wahlster: That’s right. That’s why we talk about the “Internet
of Things” in this context. The individual machines have
miniaturised web servers no bigger than a lump of sugar, which
provide services and can communicate with the workpieces in
the manufacturing process. In Industry 4.0, a workpiece can
be taken from a mobile workpiece carrier to the production
component that can implement the next required processing
step the quickest and at the lowest cost, just like service
providers bidding for business in a real marketplace. The
processing chain thus created for each workpiece is like a
kind of navigation through the factory. This ensures a high
degree of flexibility, reliability and stability for Industry 4.0.
In the changeable production environment of Industry 4.0, the
unmachined part tells the system what it should make from
and with it. The system component must in turn communicate
the services it offers to the product. The product then decides
whether and in what form it wants to accept the service and
saves it in its semantic product memory.
Does this already exist in industry?
Wahlster: Yes, this concept is already in use in some
areas of logistics. For example, a product with a specified
maximum temperature can monitor the ambient temperature
during transport using a cyber-physical system installed in