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 particu-
larly 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 com-
munication 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 com-
ponent 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