With the industry 4.0, the advancement of new technologies, the organizations are already preparing for what we call CONNECTED FACTORY: Enter the most significant characteristics of what is called ‘smart factory’ or ‘factory connected’.
The most advanced manufacturing components for the world are called ‘smart factories’ or ‘connected factories’. A network of connected devices that offer new dynamic ways of detecting demand aspects, reconfiguring supply chains and redesigning manufacturing processes in a flow of information in real time that affects any element of the value chain by erasing the limits between Demand, design, manufacture and supply. All this is already being carried out in some sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry where you already model and predict the future of the operations variables in advance and connect the decisions to the data
The advancement of technology to adopt this transformation is being crucial and what aspects in people are mandatory to address in this field. Not all factories are the same and not all sectors affect in the same way the commercial result of this type of technological developments. However, it is true that the concepts behind the deep digitization of a factory have a starting point. The starting point for intelligent manufacturing is easy to identify because it starts when the production and manufacturing plants are configured as connected factories. The questions are:
How is it done? With what technologies?
What should my company do to make it beneficial?
Does it really affect my sector?
The answers could be summarized in 4 elements.
All of them lead us to a new paradigm of operations management that takes advantage of the knowledge and experience of the company and its environment and makes its processes more flexible to add value to the entire chain of operations. The client values being the center of the chain of operations. value and feels the king who controls their business development.
The 4 fundamental aspects that a connected factory, the so-called smart factory, must comply with are:
To have intelligent sensors in all the points that can offer relevant information in the productive chain. Until now, many manufacturing equipment had sensors that are rudimentary compared to the possibilities offered by current technology. Much of the existing manufacturing assets must be modernized with intelligent sensors that record the data and also transmit it in real time to the central systems for alerts, analysis and decision making of a predictive nature. Advanced sensors also have the ability to automatically inspect any equipment and solve problems without forcing production lines to come to a complete stop.
The use of standards and protocols that allow all the elements that make up an IoT network in the factory speak to each other the same language. When several disparate networks come into play to make room for the Internet of Things in an intelligent factory, the way in which these machines converse and the way in which they deliver their conclusions or derived data to us is decisive. In fact that is what constitutes the basis of intelligent manufacturing as we defend it. The standardization of communication modes between the team, its operators and cloud-based applications will become an important area of focus for manufacturing. How these problems are handled will determine the speed and efficiency of the new manufacturing processes.
The cybersecurity of networks, applications and data that emerge from the new models of relationship between machines and the new development of derived processes represent an area of high critical risk. The security of networks, applications and data is a relatively new and unique concern for traditional manufacturing that, until now, had only had to deal with security and surveillance of a physical nature. No connected system is safe from a cyber-attack, and production plants with robots and other connected equipment can pose a risk to production, the reputation of companies and the results ..
The incorporation of Artificial Intelligence systems that establish efficient ways of using and working and that allow to predict aspects of conflict. The traditional use of expert systems in the industry will give way to models of learning type ‘machine learning’ that the greater the exposure to the production chains, the better their delivery of options. The technologies associated with the AI in a connected factory are artificial vision, augmented simulation, cyberphysical systems, cobots, additive manufacturing, the cloud for virtualization and data management.