What is a Smart Factory?
The term smart factory describes a highly digitalized and connected system where machines and equipment using sensor technology improves processes through monitoring, automation, and optimization. The wealth of data enables predictive maintenance and an increase in productivity through planning and decreased downtime.
The smart factory’s core building blocks are various intelligent sensors that provide a critical measure for the machine’s health, such as temperature, vibration, and pressure. This data combined with production, information, and communication technologies forms the backbone of what many refer to as the next industrial revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0.
The technologies that make the Industrial Internet of things or Industry 4.0 possible have always been available for the information technology domain. The same technology and software can be used to implement the next generation of industries.
How would I go about implanting these technologies?
The prerequisite to implementing any smart factory is using a sensor(s) with the ability to provide sensing information and to monitor its health. For example, an optical laser sensor can measure distance and monitor the beam’s strength reflected, alerting that the glass window might be foggy or dirty. These sensors are readily available in the market as most IO-Link sensors come with the diagnostics inbuilt. However, it varies from vendor to vendor.
The second step is getting the data from the operational technology side to the information technology level. The industrial side of things uses PLCs for control, which should be left alone as the single source of control for security reasons and efficiency. However, most IO-Link-enabled network blocks can tap into this data in read-only mode using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or a REST API. With the IO-Link consortium officially formalizing the REST API, we will see more and more vendors adopting it as a feature for their network blocks
The final step is using this data to visualize and optimize the process. There are various SCADA and MES software systems that make it possible to do this without much development. But for maximum customizability, it’s recommended to build a stack that fits your needs and provides the option to scale. There are very mature open-source software options and applications that have been in used in the IT world for decades now and transfer seamlessly to the industrial side.
The stack I have personally used and seen other companies implement is Grafana as a dashboarding software, InfluxdB as a time-series database, telegraf as a collector, and Mosquitto as MQTT broker.
The possibilities for expansion are limitless, leaving the option to add another service like TensorFlow for some analytics.
All of these are deployed as container services using Docker, another open-source project. This helps for easy deployment and maintenance.
A demonstration of this stack can be seen at the following link
Username and password are both “balluff” (all lowercase).
