Unternehmen & Trends - Ausgabe 1/2018

In tandem with the production sphere and driven by the major ICT suppliers, various platforms are emerging for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT). These will make it possible to collect and evaluate data from production operations; algorithms will be used to ultimately achieve the same bene- fits as with MES, for example by enhancing the availability of plant and machinery. De- spite strong data processing performance, many of these platforms are inhibited by the fact that access to data from machinery and production plants is difficult. One reason for this is that many small and midium sized manufacturers supply highly productive and reliable machines and equipment that are used to produce premium-quality products around the world. It is these midium-sized businesses that form the backbone of Ger- man industry: they are highly specialised, in some cases offering customised solutions to specific production tasks, but no experts for connectivity. As regards the data created by machines and components during the manufacturing process, the focus of interest switches to services linked to actual production systems. Information and communications technolo- gy (ICT) is key to these new product-related services; it is permeating traditional mechan- ical and plant engineering to an ever greater degree, thereby generating the potential for innovative services. Clearly, small and medi- um sized mechanical and plant engineering firms will have to deal with such things as IT applications, interfaces, communications and IT security much more in the future than is currently the case; they will need to find cooperation partners and offer new servic- es, and this is precisely where the challenge begins. The internet-based networking envisaged by Industry 4.0 requires machines and their components (as data sources) to supply ma- chine-readable self-descriptions of the con- tent of data that the machine can provide – a kind of ‘machine driver’. These ‘drivers’ are essential where machines and systems need to be networked or connected to a super- ordinate system (MES or IIoT platforms). If the widespread ab-sence of these machine drivers should persist, the operator or sys- tem integrator will, so to speak, have to cope with the myriad languages of Babel coming from their machines and systems. For Indus- try 4.0 to gain the broad-based acceptance it seeks, the manufacturing industry will need to master this linguistic and semantic diversity. Self-descriptions of machinery, manufacturing equipment and components Today, interlinked machines and systems are generally connected to higher-level IT systems manually. This is because mechan- ical and plant engineering continues to be dominated by the above-mentioned SMEs, with production businesses sourcing their Possible solutions to standardised, manufacturer-independent interfaces in production By Dr. Olaf Sauer, Fraunhofer IOSB Within Industry 4.0, machinery, plant components and IT systems are linked in such a way that each element in a fac- tory receives information relating to its ‘partners’. The IT systems that have been established in production divisions for many years are known as manufacturing execution systems (MES). The main benefit of these tools is to make manufacturing and assembly transparent to individual parties in a factory, and ultimately to facilitate more cost-effec- tiveness, higher quality and faster throughput. However, it is only possible to take advantage of this where much of the production equipment is already linked connected to the MES. 66  Unternehmen & Trends Images/Graphics: © IOSB Dr. Olaf Sauer The Problem: Bottleneck in Today’s Industrial IoT Solutions Visualization / SCADA Manufacturing Operations Manage _ � P � roduction Monitoring & Control nacrx11µ080 TpoxKevµoöoA. Teµ1tepa-rop reCTXll©tVÖtyKet't t§• m,o □ n ♦ $D □ m, □ n ♦e $fll.O □ fll.♦□ � m. ♦".}:, &[; m.� ♦ Abc_23-x y_Vors. Bbc_24-xy_ Tist (S)cs@©®GaO 18l®®©®Ga0@ 18lroe0® @roe@®roe@CD