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During a well-attended Open Factory April 10-12 at its Pianoro headquarters plant outside Bologna Italy, pharmaceutical packaging machinery specialist Marchesini Group officially unveiled its Industry 4.0 program.
Industry 4.0, of course, is the fourth industrial revolution, a transformation now underway where sensors, machines, and IT systems will be tightly integrated all along the value chain. These connected systems can interact with one another thanks to standardized Internet-based communications protocols. And by interacting with one another, they can analyze data to predict failure, reconfigure themselves, and adapt to changes. Industry 4.0, sometimes called the Internet of Things (IoT), will make it possible to gather and analyze data across machines, resulting in faster, more flexible, and more efficient manufacturing processes to produce higher-quality goods at a reduced cost.
Among several things made abundantly clear at the Marchesini event is that digitization, or the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format, is a critical first step on the road to Industry 4.0. It was even suggested that the very definition of Industry 4.0 might be this: digitization applied to manufacturing.
Why the emphasis on digitization? There are two primary reasons. First, it means that information in a variety of formats can be collected and processed with the same efficiency. This is especially true in Marchesini’s case since the communications protocol the firm has adopted across the board is OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). It’s a machine-to-machine communications protocol for industrial automation that’s described as SOA (service-oriented architecture), a style of software design whose basic principles are independent of vendors, product, and technologies. Other distinguishing characteristics of OPC UA include these:
- it’s open and freely available
- it’s not tied to one operating system or programming language
- it’s robust from a security standpoint
A second benefit of digitization is that once processes are digitized, it opens the door to other exciting possibilities such as machine learning, condition monitoring, remote-access monitoring, and, ultimately, the smart factory. In the smart factory, operations are carried out with minimal manual intervention, high reliability, and maximum flexibility. The automated workflows, synchronization of assets, and improved tracking and scheduling in the smart factory lead to increased yield and quality along with reduced cost and waste.
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Homepage image: The demo line assembled by Marchesini consisted of three machines for primary, secondary, and tertiary packaging of pharmaceutical blister packs.
